Being an organist around 1860

What was it like to be an organist in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century? In the complex terrain of professional music making at this time, an environment characterized by varied activities, methods of training and modes of patronage, and often viewed by the general public with less-than-favourable opinions, it is possible to identify organists as a group only in a loose sense. That organists deployed their skills in cathedrals and churches (including school, hospital and asylum chapels, etc.) provides a focus, but whilst such positions rooted organists in a recognizable, prestigious tradition and allowed them to stave off accusations of immorality, employment conditions and remuneration could vary hugely, as could training and professional aspiration, and also the extent to which other pursuits, musical and non-musical, had to be combined with organ playing to provide the organist with a living. A large sample of organists studied by Deborah Rohr revealed that around 70% combined teaching with their organ playing whilst the remaining 30% pursued several types of musical work to supplement income.Footnote ⁷ According to one contemporaneous calculation, average annual salaries by the 1850s were £50 in parish churches and £150 in cathedrals;Footnote ⁸ in fact, it is clear that there was considerable deviation from these estimates.

Advertisements in and correspondence with periodicals around the middle decades of the century suggest a challenging environment, characterized by low wages, a sense of insecurity and doubts on the part of organists as to status. Posts were much sought after, however, and at times were advertised so that other activities could be combined with those of organ playing.Footnote ⁹ In some cases organists advertised their services and even worked for free in order to have a ‘position’: church employment brought status and respectability, and was helpful in maintaining a teaching practice. There is evidence to show that there was rapid turnover in some appointments, and evidently the most skilful organists could earn a reasonable living if relocations were adroitly managed and local connections exploited. The engagement of an articled pupil was a means of expanding occupational horizons and managing workload. The age-old practice of deputies, though, where organists sustained several posts by putting in (sometimes inferior) substitutes, was a problem for the maintenance of standards and decent wages. The appointment of organists was subject to procedural variation (by clerical appointment, competition judged by congregation, adjudication by professional umpire), favouritism and at times foul play.Footnote ¹⁰

A recent study of the organ and organists of one important urban church in a provincial city in this period helps us to grasp not untypical circumstances. At St Swithun's, Worcester, one organist during his short tenure in the late 1840s combined his church duties (which were paid for by congregational subscriptions and benefit services) with singing in the cathedral choir, teaching piano, organ and singing, and trading in pianos; his longer-lasting successor, who eventually had a regularized income of £20 by 1859 and £30 by 1867, worked as a compositor in the offices of a local newspaper.Footnote ¹¹ One James Fitzgerald, an early member of the College of Organists, can also be considered indicative of the ‘rank and file’. Son of a coachman, Fitzgerald carved out a provincial musician's existence with (eventually) two church appointments, held alongside teaching commitments, composing and directing bands and ensembles.Footnote ¹² Organists in cathedrals – here appointments hinged on the employment of institutional ‘types’, including musicians who themselves had been cathedral (or Chapel Royal) choristers and/or had been articled to cathedral organists – could bring in a higher income than their counterparts in parish and other churches and chapels,Footnote ¹³ but employment conditions and artistic prospects were hardly favourable until the end of the nineteenth century, as comments below relating to S.S. Wesley, a protagonist in the College of Organists’ early story, will remind us. Rosemary Golding's study of the salaries and status of (mostly) parish and chapel organists in this period provides a helpful overview:

Periodicals not only provided a forum for employment issues to be aired and defined, but also provided, through the editorials, notices, reviews and so on, an arena in which the organist and his work could be considered from a more professional perspective and as a legitimate field of inquiry and debate. The suitability of church music, the proceedings of choral festivals, the training of clergy and musicians, matters of churchmanship and of course the organ, its design, positioning and repertoire were topics covered – often candidly and with great zeal – in The Musical World and The Musical Times, and by the early to mid 1860s The Musical Standard and The Choir and Musical Record. The proximity of this coverage to material on music in general and national musical life allowed church music and organ playing to be raised to a new aesthetic level. In many ways, the body of critical and polemical writing in this area mapped out a hinterland to the project of professionalization that the College of Organists espoused. In particular, The Musical Standard is relevant and will be mentioned below.

The notion of being a downtrodden organist may well have prevailed, but by the 1860s and 1870s, organists and church musicians, increasing numbers of whom coalesced around the fledgling College of Organists, began to encounter new experiences and opportunities. Underlying – and stimulating – the College's own search for identity and mission in its early years was a complex and dynamic environment in which new national consensuses were emerging with respect to professional standing, academic status, churchmanship, innovation in organ-building and, more generally, with respect to standards in music making.Footnote ¹⁵ As found elsewhere in Victorian discourse, expressions of ‘progress’ and certainties about the value of self-improvement resonate through the College's annual transactions in these early years.Footnote ¹⁶

It was a period of rapid change, not least in terms of church building (in London and other urban areas), in the serious and scholarly treatment of church musicFootnote ¹⁷ and in the installation of new organs according to the so-called ‘German System’, an indigenous interpretation of design principles gleaned from continental organs and used as a means of standardizing construction.Footnote ¹⁸ With the installation of new organs came new musical aspirations, driven by a growing and much-documented appreciation of Bach's organ music, and interest in playing ‘legitimate’ organ works in recognizable classical genres: preludes, toccatas, fugues, sonatas and so forth, as opposed to a diet largely comprising arrangements of choral and instrumental music. The artistic persona of the organist was also becoming more visible to the public as the College came into existence. The large, groundbreaking organ of Birmingham Town Hall (installed in 1834) had essentially been conceived as an instrument to accompany choral performances but it subsequently acquired a role as an instrument for recitals and thereby acted as a catalyst for a new strand of music making: the town hall organ recital. By the end of the nineteenth century, the culture nurtured at Birmingham had become a national norm, and the municipal organists (many of them high earning) who played weekly and entertaining public recitals, and who accompanied an ever-expanding catalogue of choral works, became agents of cultural and social improvement.Footnote ¹⁹ Some of them very successfully aped the recital culture of the piano and violin virtuosos of the time.

In the first extended institutional appraisal of the origins and early progress of the College, achievements in organ playing before the College's foundation largely were seen to have been shaped by a number of worthy and capable individuals, all of whom somehow transcended a variety of limitations in training, opportunity, instruments and musical expectations.Footnote ²⁰ The College's inception, the focus of the current article, was presented as (somehow) an inevitable outgrowth of this environment, and likewise the product of the actions of Great Men. Foremost of these was Richard Limpus (1824–1875), the College of Organists’ acknowledged founder.

Limpus was the organist of St Michael's, Cornhill, City of London, and the institution's first Secretary (Figure 1), and he set about specifically to elevate the status of parish organists. Limpus's early proselytizing was directed towards those holding organistships in London and (what he termed) the leading country towns, though it is clear from an early influx of members occupying cathedral and collegiate positions that some courting of those constituencies took place, so that broad and authoritative support for the proposals could be garnered. Limpus, along with a few like-minded colleagues, identified the potential for professionalism in organ playing through association and certification, and to achieve these ends, they further identified the need for effective patronage and a national profile. Within 18 months of a college first being proposed, through a combination of planning and opportunism, the Archbishop of Canterbury had become the College's honorary President, many important organists and supporters had been granted honorary membership in one form or another, and a scheme of provincial local committees to work in concert with the London council was being debated.

Fig. 1

Richard Davidge Limpus (1824–1875), founder and first Honorary Secretary of the College of Organists. Derived from an image published by the RCO in 1914. RCO Archives.

Limpus and his fellow ‘founding fathers’ can perhaps best be characterized as a group of professionally and socially aspiring church organists who earned their living exclusively through the profession of music, were cognisant of broadening horizons in organ playing (liturgical and repertoire-based) and were attuned in varying degrees to emerging norms in ritualism and the use of the choral service in the Established Church.Footnote ²¹ Many directly involved in the formation of the College held metropolitan church posts – this was decidedly a London-based initiative. Although the topic is beyond the scope of this article, it is interesting to chart over the course of subsequent decades how and with what effect the institution's council comprised London church musicians who complemented and, in equal numbers, held in balance those from the provinces, a sector which became largely the domain of cathedral, Oxbridge and public school organists.

Richard Limpus and his professional activities

Key to this venture was Limpus, whose progress in the London church scene provides a fruitful area of inquiry. He was the son of an organist – Richard Davidge Limpus Sr (died 1868), the blind organist of All Saints’ (Old Church), Isleworth – and his brother, Henry Francis Limpus, was a clergyman and a composer.Footnote ²² Before his appointment to St Michael's, Cornhill in 1849, Richard Limpus Jr held the post at the City church of St Andrew Undershaft (1847) and was the organist of The Philanthropic Society (1847–49), a society set up to reform boys out of criminality, the now-demolished chapel of which was somewhere in St George's Fields, Southwark. The Society relocated from London in 1849, an event that presumably precipitated Limpus's application to St Michael's.Footnote ²³ During the College's formal inaugural meeting in March 1864 (see below), Limpus confided that he had no personal reason to complain about his professional circumstances at St Michael's, but he revealed that earlier in life he had experienced the disadvantages that he hoped an organists’ college would be able to remedy. Little is known about his early working life so it is hard to say what is being referred to. However, we do know that Limpus was disqualified at St Stephen's, Coleman Street in 1844, owing to the lack of a testimonial.Footnote ²⁴ Such testimonials were frequently required and open to much fabrication, and were in no small part the reason why the College of Organists declared its intention, in emulation of the privileged professions, to issue certificates of proficiency after examination.

Limpus's arrival at St Michael's coincided with the modernization of the organ according to the ‘German System’, and spending on a choir (comprising four or five voices, receiving quarterly payments) and music increased markedly with the commencement of his tenure; during the 1850s, and beyond, in a prosperous and investment-conscious church, this remained the trend.Footnote ²⁵ St Michael's was remodelled by Sir George Gilbert Scott (and others) according to High Victorian taste in the late 1850s (this included the relocation of the organ to the chancel), and on its re-opening became renowned for its choral services and its musical influence, as a report dating from September 1862 testifies: apparently, St Michael's not only relieved the ‘monotony’ of City services but also acted as a catalyst for several other City churches to establish choirs.Footnote ²⁶ Limpus's seriousness of purpose in church music is borne out by his trialling of ‘free chant’ (according to the model proposed by John Crowdy),Footnote ²⁷ and by the large-scale choral services (with multiple choirs) he directed at St Michael's and elsewhere. The further, technologically progressive rebuilding of the St Michael's organ in 1868 – using an early example of electric action and a detached console – can also be mentioned as a sign of personal and musical aspiration, as well as an indication of ecclesiastical prosperity and confidence.Footnote ²⁸

This was the picture at the founder's church in the run-up to, and the early years after, the College's foundation. Situated in ecclesiastical modernity, in a celebrated and well-to-do church, Limpus would have cut an important figure amongst his brethren; he was evidently a respected musician and apparently possessed conciliatory manners.Footnote ²⁹ Ahead of formal proceedings, it appears that he and three fellow organists – E.J. Hopkins, E.M. Lott and J.W. George – met informally at the Jamaica Coffee House (next to St Michael's) to discuss the idea of a college, and how it might be set up.Footnote ³⁰ As organist of the Temple Church and a well-respected and well-travelled expert on organs, Edward J. Hopkins was an entirely modern, professional figure,Footnote ³¹ as was Edwin Lott, an organist-composer and educator.Footnote ³² Moreover, Lott's well-documented activities as a freemason, and the masonic profiles of others in the founding generation, strongly imply a specific cultural framework for the College's inception.Footnote ³³ The College's use of Freemasons’ Hall and Tavern for meetings, and as a corresponding address in its early years, also directs our attention to the institution's closeness to a movement that had emerged by this stage as a well-organized philanthropic network, with a Christian ethos and civic presence – a movement that, as Andrew Prescott points out, offered a means by which ‘the late Victorian middle classes could affirm their respectability and social prestige and feel a vicarious sense of community’.Footnote ³⁴ Thus far, masonic affiliations have gone unrecorded in appraisals of the College's formation.

First steps towards an ‘Association of Church Organists’

The earliest surviving archival document relating to the College of Organists is a printed letter sent from the Vestry Room at St Michael's, Cornhill, and dated 6 November 1863 (Figure 2). Signed personally by Limpus (as the organist of St Michael's), this circular invited recipients to a meeting at Mullen's Hotel, Ironmonger Lane on 23 November in order ‘to consider the expediency of forming an Association of Church Organists, and others, with a view of improving the status of that particular branch of the musical profession’. No record survives of how many invitations were sent (the print-run of a subsequent circular was agreed as 250) or of the basis on which they were sent, but 37 named individuals attended the meeting and several letters confirming approval of the object of the meeting and expressing co-operation and support were received in time for the gathering.Footnote ³⁵ These were read out.

Fig. 2

Circular of 6 November 1863 announcing the formation of an ‘Association of Church Organists’. RCO Archives.

There were two notable correspondents: John Bishop ‘of Cheltenham’ and Samuel Sebastian Wesley. Their letters do not survive, and the contents are unknown, though the impact of such supportive correspondence can be gauged. Both, and especially Wesley, had become known as advocates of reform in church music and of improved conditions for organists, and their writings offer detailed and informative critiques. Through his exhortations in A Few Words on Cathedral Music, published in 1849,Footnote ³⁶ Wesley had achieved considerable notoriety but also an emblematic position. Building on earlier criticism, his pamphlet had identified the degenerate state of cathedral music, the workings of an indifferent clergy and the lamentable pay and conditions for those who musically served the Established Church. However, Wesley had not only levelled criticism but also had proposed reform in the cathedrals and collegiate churches by placing musical matters clearly in the hands of organists, who as professionals were to be remunerated appropriately. As for the appointment of organists, they were to be elected through peer-group committees comprising the organists of the seven neighbouring cathedrals; a ‘Musical College’, attached to a foundation, was also advocated as a means of providing a ‘complete musical education to the musical professors employed by the Church’.Footnote ³⁷ Organists were, Wesley had memorably written in this text, the ‘bishops of their calling – men consecrated by their genius, and set apart for duties which only the best talent of the kind can adequately fulfil’.Footnote ³⁸ Wesley's aspiration for the raised status and improved conduct of music in the cathedral service, nurtured and curated by men of genius, speaks of a highly strung artist whose vision was moulded by bitter experience, though as Peter Horton points out, one might ask which of Wesley's cathedral colleagues – most of whom he had little time for – would have actually considered themselves artists.Footnote ³⁹ A comparison of the metropolitan-educated Wesley with his long-standing predecessor at Winchester Cathedral, George Chard, is apposite: Chard, a local boy, was appointed a lay vicar (after a choristership at St Paul's Cathedral) and then organist, but his tenure was marked by little of musical distinction (although Charles Knyvett said he had a ‘very nice feeling for music’) and instances of professional neglect that resulted in disciplinary action.Footnote ⁴⁰

By 1863 and the onset of Limpus's plan, Wesley's pursuit of reform seemed over (his last published work in this field dates from 1854), but although some of what he had advocated had naturally come to fruition by that stage, his potential to lend a weighty imprimatur to a new project remained undiminished.Footnote ⁴¹ His contribution to the embryonic College of Organists appears limited to attendance at a single meeting – on 25 January 1864 and scheduled to suit his diary – of what became termed the Provisional Committee (see below). It was Limpus who proposed Wesley for this committee, and the elder statesman's name subsequently appears in the first membership register (dated to the day of inauguration: 12 March 1864), but several details indicate that this is as far as Wesley's connection went.Footnote ⁴²

By 1863, John Bishop, the other well-known correspondent to the first meeting, had held a number of posts as an organist in Cheltenham, but was most widely known for his organ transcriptions, editorial work and translations of theoretical works.Footnote ⁴³ Limpus had perhaps identified Bishop as a potential ally because of the latter's recent, self-published pamphlet on the degraded nature of church music: Remarks on the Causes of the Present Generally Degraded State of Music in our Churches (Cheltenham, 1860). Not unexpectedly, Bishop at times cites Wesley's A Few Words in his articulate and insightful text, and draws on the writings of other commentators (Baron, Hodges, Jebb, La Trobe) as he addresses in his view the root cause of the degradation: clerical ignorance of music. This results in, amongst other things, the clergy's social and professional contempt for organists and in clerical unwillingness to delegate authority to organists in musical matters.Footnote ⁴⁴ Pitiful stipends are noted, as are troublesome aesthetic matters. Bishop argues that if only the necessary inducement to labour were achievable the cause of sacred music would, after a while, improve, and the amalgamation, though perhaps unconscious, of sacred and secular styles in church music would beneficially diminish as professional men focused on ecclesiastical duties rather than on eking out an existence from diverse musical pursuits.Footnote ⁴⁵ Like Wesley, Bishop was, in his absence, elected to the Provisional Committee; however, there is no evidence that he ever attended meetings and there is no record of his eventual enrolment in the College.Footnote ⁴⁶

Another correspondent to the 23 November meeting was Thomas Kilner who, unlike Wesley and Bishop, went on to contribute to the College's set-up committee. Kilner was an organist, composer (composing a typical mixture of organ music, church music and secular ballads) and he was a writer. In a collection of short essays, mainly reprinted from The Musical Standard,Footnote ⁴⁷ Kilner covers a range of contemporary issues in church music. Though post-dating slightly the discussions of 1863–64 about the College's foundation, these commentaries arguably give an insight into various preoccupations shared amongst members of the founders’ group, most notably the propagation of cathedral-style worship – the notion of the cathedral as the ‘pattern church’ of the whole diocese is strong – and the need for regularity and decorum in the conduct of music in services. Kilner speaks for a Protestant ‘mainstream’, in which the Book of Common Prayer is central to doctrine and worship, and whose example could be extended to a single unifying hymn book and anthem book.Footnote ⁴⁸

Early proceedings and personalities

The first meeting, on 23 November 1863, resulted in a Provisional Committee. In addition to those already mentioned, it comprised several well-known London-based musicians. Joseph Surman, a conductor (ex-Sacred Harmonic Society), writer and publisher, after having chaired the initial meeting, was commissioned further with the chairmanship of this provisional group.

A series of meetings took place in the coming weeks and months. A name for the society was debated, and in December a circular about the proposed College (with a print-run not exceeding 250) was sent to various ‘professional organists’ in London and ‘the leading country towns’. By early January, some replies to the circular had been received and 17 new members were added to the Provisional Committee. Individuals of note in this second in-take were Dr Charles Steggall, Professor of Organ and Harmony at the Royal Academy of Music and respected hymnologist, and Ebenezer Prout, by this stage a notable organist and composer. Steggall, who eventually spoke to the College as its first lecturer in the autumn of 1864, was important for the associations he brought (for example, the increasingly prominent diocesan conferences and choir festivals) and for the favourable connections he enjoyed with the clergy.Footnote ⁴⁹

Walter Bond Gilbert also appeared in the proceedings for the first time. Later in life, Gilbert provided an important conduit to the College's origins. Speaking at the College's Annual Dinner in June 1905, he offered an extended reminiscence of the College's foundation, prefacing it for reasons of context with remarks on his earliest experiences as an organist.Footnote ⁵⁰ He referred with incredulity to the traditional English organ of the late-Georgian period he had known as a boy; he also shared impressions made on him by some of the capital's organists in the early 1840s: George Warne at the Temple Church, subsequently replaced by the young and forward-looking E.J. Hopkins (eventually a close friend); Thomas Henshaw, who had a strong following for his voluntary playing at St Pancras Church; and George Cooper (Jr), sometime assistant organist at St Paul's Cathedral, through whom Gilbert encountered the young John Stainer, Cooper's pupil. From modest beginnings in an environment populated by such figures, the College had succeeded, Gilbert maintained, through the perseverance of Richard Limpus and had soon been able to settle into meaningful routines (lectures, examinations and so on) and flourish under patronage. Speaking the following year, Gilbert, by then one of the last surviving founding members, re-phrased and affirmed remarks once attributed to Limpus about the practical and moral benefits of ‘artistic’ union: ‘It has been said of the College … that constant association would tend to good feeling; that artists could not meet together without benefiting one another, and that the moral power resulting from the combination would not be without its effect on the world outside’.Footnote ⁵¹ Gilbert then went on to quote a critique by Edmund Turpin, Limpus's successor as Secretary, which concluded that the College had been an agent of both socio-economic change and educational advancement: ‘the universal improvement which has taken place in the position with increased emoluments of the organists of this country has been largely brought about by the broader education and increased self-respect of our players, an effect to which is mainly due an advance in social position and status for which this Institution is largely responsible’.Footnote ⁵²

Now little known, W.B. Gilbert actually provides much material for a critical view of the College's formation. His background and his employments at a series of provincial parish churches (before emigration to New York in 1869 to become organist of Trinity Church) are indicative, even if only in part, of the experiences of many who were minded to join the ranks of the College in its early years.Footnote ⁵³ There was, we can note, an interest in church composition (hymn tunes, service music and oratorios) and in the acquisition of academic qualification: Gilbert supplicated for the Oxford MusB and MusD (awarded in 1854 and 1888 respectively). An erstwhile pupil of Samuel Sebastian Wesley, he may well have felt particularly attuned to the debates in the mid century surrounding the degraded nature of church music and cultivated an articulate stance towards the social, economic and artistic injustices borne by organists at an early age. Transition at the Temple Church, where cathedral-style choral service was decisively introduced and E.J. Hopkins was in due course appointed organist and choirmaster, was also perhaps an important formative event in his adolescence.Footnote ⁵⁴

Gilbert was given the responsibility of speaking to the College of Organists in the inaugural lecture series (1864–65). His topic encompassed much that was of central importance to the fledgling College. In ‘Church Organists, Past and Present: their Duties, Position, Responsibilities, Rewards, and Prospects’ (delivered on 21 March 1865),Footnote ⁵⁵ Gilbert included statistics about payments made to organists past and present, and discussed much in his narrative, including the training of organists and the performance and effectiveness of the musical portion of the Divine Service ‘in these days of wonderful progress’ (synopsis). He opened, however, with remarks on the perceived social inferiority of organists, and referred to well-intentioned efforts over the welfare and interests of church organists that had, hitherto, come to nothing. In the manner of a manifesto, Gilbert weaves very efficiently the establishment of the College into an historical framework and an emerging national and professional picture; here was a body with the potential to grant diplomas and certificates of merit to competent candidates and bring about other advantages so that the ‘Church Organist may yet bask in that sunshine of favour, which, according to the standard of the general progress of this country, has hitherto been grudgingly called out, or unjustly withheld from him’ (synopsis).

The inauguration of the ‘College of Organists’: 12 March 1864

The final meetings of the Provisional Committee in early 1864 turned the spotlight on a forthcoming inaugural meeting and to the report and proposed rules that were to be read at it. Though lacking precise definition, professional status sits conceptually at the centre of these formulations and underpins the exercise of ‘gate-keeping’ with respect to access and voting; that this was a London-based venture is underscored by the composition of the council and the subscription rates. The rules to be put before the inaugural meeting were as follows:

1. 1. Title. ‘The College of Organists’.

2. 2. Object. That this College is instituted for the promotion of intercourse among organists with a view to the improvement of their professional standing, and for the encouragement of church music and the diffusion of musical knowledge generally.

3. 3. That this College shall consist of Professional, Corresponding, and Honorary members.

4. 4. That Amateurs may be admitted as subscribers on payment of one guinea per annum, which shall entitle them to all the advantages of membership except the privilege of voting.

5. 5. That no person under the age of eighteen shall be eligible for membership.

6. 6. That each Candidate for admission shall be proposed by one professional member and seconded by another and subsequently elected by a majority of votes in Council.

7. 7. That the annual subscription shall be One Guinea: and for members residing at a distance of more than thirty miles from London Half a Guinea.

8. 8. That the Government of the College shall be vested in the hands of a Council of twenty-one professional members, two-thirds of whom shall be town members.

9. 9. Mode of election. That the Council shall be elected at a General Meeting by Ballot.

10. 10. That the officers shall consist of a President, Vice-Presidents, Treasurer and Secretary, to be elected at a General Meeting and to have the power of voting in Council.Footnote ⁵⁶

As planned, the public meeting to form a college went ahead on 12 March at the Lower Hall, Exeter Hall, Strand.Footnote ⁵⁷ Limpus was invited to take the chair and set the scene:

Limpus continued by outlining the plight of the majority of parochial organists. Capturing the downbeat tone already identified in the periodical literature of the day, Limpus classed them as overworked and ill paid, or prone to being set aside socially; he opined that it was deference, respect and cordiality, in other words the qualities usually accorded to members of a respected profession, which organists lacked. It was clear to him, through personal experience and through the correspondence that he had received, that many professional brethren now sat ‘pining in the cold shade’ and perhaps even ‘suffering under a sense of oppression’.

For Limpus and for the others who shared his modern ideals, buoyed up as they apparently were by correspondence, the solution was a college that would improve, by various means, organists as a ‘race’. The foundation of such an institution was not only a matter of professional honour but also of personal respect and comfort, and the college Limpus and the Provisional Committee were proposing would attempt to carry out its work through holding lectures, by awarding prizes for church music and organ playing, by keeping a library and by offering accommodation to members, the benefits of a club bringing much needed ‘intercommunication’. Limpus's manifesto was also explicit on the topics of accreditation and legal representation:

In laying out his case, Limpus had paid particular attention to ‘Physic’ and ‘Law’, and these professions provide an interesting context for the self-generated organization now sought by organists. As David Wright has pointed out in his study of the Associated Board, medicine (to take one of them) and music enjoyed some parallels.Footnote ⁵⁸ Medicine, a notoriously ‘fuzzy’ and diverse occupation, and one with the taint of quackery, found the process of establishing a coherent corporate identity in the nineteenth century particularly exacting. But this field had its old chartered bodies and eventually the British Medical Association, and by 1858 a General Medical Council which brought self-regulation by statute. By contrast, the similarly diffuse world of professional music, prone to its own fair share of ill repute, found it conceptually irrelevant to unite, except in the case of music teachers and organists, the latter group being particularly mindful it seems of the position it enjoyed and the potential it possessed for incorporation through a Royal Charter. Essentially, in the absence of any pre-existing system of professional accreditation (the existing degrees did not suffice), the College's intention was to cultivate lines of demarcation between those fit to practise as organists and those who were not; but as the coming years would confirm, this could only come through cultivating patterns of mutual consent, and not through statutory regulation – the practitioners of music could hardly be held to account in the ways that doctors and lawyers were, out of necessity, held to account in matters of competency.

One contemporaneous periodical can be closely identified with the College's birth. Coinciding exactly with the inauguration, an editorial on the proposed College appeared in The Musical Standard, then some 18 months old.Footnote ⁵⁹ Aspects of what Limpus and the Provisional Committee were proposing resonated with subjects that had been covered in the Standard's early issues, and in many respects, the environment in which the College came into existence can be gauged in considerable detail from the contents of this particular journal.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although there remains uncertainty about the early division of editorial responsibilities, The Musical Standard was, it seems, founded by John Crowdy, A.W. Hammond and William J. Westbrook.Footnote ⁶¹ Hammond and Westbrook were members of the College of Organists’ Provisional Committee, and as pointed out, Crowdy's work on chanting was trialled in the same period by Limpus. Little is known about Hammond, who was to become the first Treasurer of the College. It was Hammond who had formally proposed the setting up of the Provisional Committee and through Limpus's support had sat on it. Westbrook provides more fertile investigative ground and, like Gilbert, he offers further insight into the type of organist and church musician for whom professional affiliation according to the collegiate model was desirable. A knowledgeable and hardworking musician (his most enduring organist's post being that at St Bartholomew's, Sydenham), Westbrook wrote organ and choral music and arranged and edited many volumes; he was an articulate writer, and was for many years a musical examiner to the College of Preceptors, an institution which arguably contributed something of a model of organization and ethos to the organists at this juncture.Footnote ⁶²

The Standard's editorial on the College of Organists (see note 59) therefore appeared on top of the bedrock of earlier comment on a professional union for musicians, the want of a chartered institute, college or academy, and many related issues. The paper surmised that professional association and fellowship were clearly desirable and manageable amongst church musicians so that the conditions enjoyed in other arts and professions might be replicated and lead beneficially to higher status and material reward. Echoing its recent criticism of conventional, clichéd notions of the organist and his activities, the Standard actually expressed surprise that a ‘very large and intelligent section’ of the profession had thus far not enjoyed combination, and it welcomed the energies of Limpus and was optimistic that support from the ‘whole body of church organists’ would quickly ensue.

The Standard speculated further about the proposed College's future work and influence, not least in the field of accreditation, which might remove the lame practice of appointment through testimonial, and in the stimulation of young musicians, through whom, ultimately, proper advancements would be made:

Returning to the inaugural meeting at Exeter Hall, the Provisional Committee's report was adopted and the new society's rules were, on second hearing, separately considered and voted on. Most were carried unanimously, but some were debated and amended. Of note were the amendments to membership categories and the subscription rate. An amendment had been proposed to Rule 4 so as not to admit ‘amateurs’; Westbrook spoke against the amendment and it was evidently an unpopular one on a show of hands. This was concluded by amateurs being admitted as subscribers but not as members. The difference in subscription rates to define ‘Town’ and ‘Country’ was also rejected decisively in favour of a uniform rate (Limpus read correspondence from potential country members that apparently showed a readiness to pay the full rate). Enrolment of the newly founded College of Organists then proceeded. The Council as appointed on this occasion sees several come through from the Provisional Committee. What is now noticeable is the presence of provincial organists and those working in cathedrals. The full Council was as follows (presented here as in the original report):

The matter of a President and Vice-Presidents was held over. Limpus was officially elected Secretary and Hammond was installed as Treasurer; he held this position only for a matter of months, after which his name drops from view. Within the space of two years, this council list would contain more than one cathedral-type organist: the organists of Westminster Abbey (James Turle) and St Paul's Cathedral (John Goss) featured by 1866, as did Dr George Elvey of St George's Chapel, Windsor.

Early business and the first General Meeting

A first General Meeting was then scheduled. In the run-up to this meeting (on 5 July), meetings of the newly elected council – held in various places, including E.J. Hopkins's house and The Freemasons’ Tavern – dealt with important issues. The chairmanship passed around the group and various subcommittees were set to work. An early question was what exactly constituted ‘professional qualification’ for membership, to which the conclusion drawn was that organists were eligible for membership if they ‘derived no part of their income from the practice of any other calling than the profession of music or of subjects connected therewith’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The fledgling society's rules were debated. A scheme of prizes for new choral and organ compositions was instigated, and the conditions for entry were discussed. Announcements for the prizes were placed in the London periodicals and newspapers deemed appropriate by the Secretary and Treasurer. The umpires for these competitions were settled.

It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss this initiative in any detail, but it can be noted that Hopkins was common to both competition panels, and council member William Spark appeared on the organ panel as an adjudicator. His was an interesting appointment. Later that decade, in his periodical The Organist's Quarterly Journal, Spark attempted to consolidate the idea of norms and standards in the composition of original organ music (as opposed to transcription). Alongside emerging consensuses in organ construction and tonal design, new generic and stylistic expectations were beginning to make their presence felt, and Spark, who held the post of organist at Leeds Town Hall, honed this tendency in his Journal with various works for Divine Service or for concert use: ‘Loud and Soft Voluntaries, Preludes, Postludes, Fantasias, Sonatas, Offertories, Symphonies, Fugues, and other organ pieces of different degrees of difficulty and length, and in various styles ancient and modern’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Foreign and English composers were to be included – ‘Art is universal – the language of music is identical throughout the civilised world’ – and although able modern English musicians had from time to time published organ music, thereby increasing levels of taste, there remained, according to Spark, a want on the part of both professional and amateur organists for more original material.Footnote ⁶⁶ Henry Hiles of Manchester was the prize-winner in this first organ competition (for his Fantasia in D minor) and the first to win the choral competition was J. Hamilton Clarke for his anthem The Lord is my light.Footnote ⁶⁷ Performances of prize-winning pieces were organized and arrangements for printing were put in place.

Routine elections of new members took place in the early weeks, and new arrivals were classified as Members, Honorary Members or Subscribers. In the latter category, for instance, three organ-builders were admitted: Flight, Robson and Walker. A notable expression of interest in being connected to the College came in this period from Sir George Smart, Composer to Her Majesty's Chapel Royal and a mainstay of British musical life for more than 50 years. The minutes reveal that contact with him increased and communication flourished. Capitalizing on the connection, the College soon elected Smart as an Honorary Member and it was decided to invite him to take the role of a Vice-President after the forthcoming General Meeting. Smart's imprimatur was of great value to the College because of his national position as a respected professional musician, who had promoted new standards in the organization of musical life and in the training of musicians.Footnote ⁶⁸ Out of respect and in a bid for a visible stamp of authority, the College eventually appointed the very elderly Smart as the chairman (in an honorary capacity) of the first board of examiners.Footnote ⁶⁹

The College's first General Meeting was held at Freemasons’ Tavern, Great Queen Street on 5 July. Smart chaired, at the outset eulogizing the objects the institution had set for itself and complimenting those who had taken up the initiative. The membership at this stage was recorded as 134. Perhaps of most interest is the abolition of the rules agreed at the inaugural meeting on 12 March and their replacement, after voting, by a series of new laws. Through these new laws, it was confirmed that the category of Fellow would be used to elect ‘accredited’ members of the musical profession, whilst that of ‘Associate’ would encompass not only organists who held or had held posts, but those ‘interested in the specific objects of the College [and] carry on any other profession or occupation than that of music’; the Associateship category was also used for electing both Lady Professional Associates (effectively Fellows) and Lady Amateur Associates.Footnote ⁷⁰ These categories were realigned to the examination structure once that was introduced in 1866, but for the moment, an issue that had exercised the College and interested onlookers appeared resolved: the precise status of amateur players and supporters in the eyes of the College.Footnote ⁷¹

The College was on the institutional ‘map’ and what comes over strongly at this stage is the orientation towards nurturing unity of purpose between organists and the clergy: it was to become a common thread in subsequent committee meetings. Smart emphasized this and, according to the minutes of 5 July, offered advice. The ‘highly satisfactory proceedings’ of the General Meeting were recorded in The Musical World, including details of the members’ dinner at which toasts to the press (a correspondent from The Sunday Times spoke) and to the Church and clergy were made: in response to the latter, the Revd Mr Sorsbie, former precentor of Rochester Cathedral, ‘urged and condoned good mutual understanding’.Footnote ⁷²

Consolidation, patronage and prospects

By 6 May 1865, 14 months after its foundation, the College was in a position to take its next step towards elevating the office of church organist. A deputation, led by Smart, and including Limpus, was granted an audience with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Charles Longley. The purpose was to explain the position and prospects of the new College, and to seek the Archbishop's acceptance of the office of President, thereby encouraging ‘the Council and Members to persevere in the good work so well begun, and likely to bring forth good fruit to the honour and glory of Almighty God’.Footnote ⁷³ The Archbishop's acceptance of the presidency – which was forthcoming – was essential if members of the new College Council were to have success in securing the co-operation of the clergy of the Church of England, without whose support ‘Church Music can never flourish nor be productive of that amount of benefit and good which it is most assuredly designed to produce’. During the audience, Charles Stephens, organist of St Clement Danes, Strand, emphasized the College's desire to identify itself with the Church explicitly as a society of church organists, and to co-operate with the clergy ‘for the general good of the national establishment’.

As the Archbishop heard on this occasion, prizes had already been offered by the College for church and organ compositions, and by this date five lectures had also taken place (Figure 3). These had all been given by distinguished members of the musical profession, intimately connected to church music in one way or another; Limpus spoke of how the lectures had been calculated to foster a desire for the improvement of church music.Footnote ⁷⁴ Charles Steggall's opening lecture, ‘On the Music of the Church’, offered a grand sweep of ecclesiastical music from biblical times to the seventeenth century. The conclusion is interesting for its affirmation that the office of church musician is now to be seen as an honourable one with status, and Steggall articulates a viewpoint to be found elsewhere in texts connected to the foundation of the College in emphasizing that music should not be regarded as second to divinity, law or medicine, into which professions access can be gained after several years study, but instead the worthy pursuit of a lifetime, and one demanding proper respect:

Fig. 3

Bill poster for the first series of lectures given by the newly founded College of Organists in 1864 and 1865. RCO Archives.

Intentionally promoting a rounded and intellectually stimulating view of the church musician's world, the lectures continued with offerings from two distinguished scholars of the organ, both of whom were College members. E.F. Rimbault spoke on ‘The Early English Organ Builders’, which was published in full by the London publisher Alfred Whittingham the following year,Footnote ⁷⁶ and E.J. Hopkins continued the chronological overview with a presentation on English organ-building from Father Smith to the Great Exhibition. The two lecturers were familiar names to many organists by 1864 because of their combined endeavours in The Organ, its History and Construction (London: Robert Cocks, 1855, and two revised editions). John Hullah spoke on ‘The History of Musical Notation’ in February 1865, and picking up from Steggall's inaugural lecture, the last in the series by Walter Gilbert, as discussed above, clearly articulated the instincts and beliefs of the founding fathers. During the audience with the Archbishop, it was Gilbert, repeating an essential point already made in his lecture and rehearsing an original institutional object, who voiced the College's ambition to acquire a Charter in order to empower it to grant diplomas or confer certificates of merit, and thereby ensure the general fitness of a church musician to fulfil the important duties of the office. The acquisition of that Charter was to take another 30 years, but examining started almost immediately, in July 1866, becoming twice yearly from the summer of 1871.Footnote ⁷⁷

By the second AGM at the end of June 1865, the College had reached an important milestone. Despite financial insecurity and a lack of permanent accommodation, it showed confidence in terms of its organizational structure and strategic vision. The archival records to this point bequeath not only the detailed choreography of association but some of the voices of those who joined together to discover a common purpose. This article has sought to capture the mood and the salient events of the initial enterprise.

It appears, particularly when one scrutinizes the press of the time, that the organists referred to above had in combination seized the initiative at an opportune moment. Conditions were favourable in a number of sectors: professional, ecclesiastical and musical. Moreover, politically, organists found themselves at a tipping point where sufficient respect and support was evident from enough of the clergy – increasingly conscious of the value of good musical standards in Divine Worship – to encourage concerted and determined action that might improve the professional and social status of a musical constituency which could boast more effectively than many others a ‘cognitive exclusiveness’.Footnote ⁷⁸ A selection of early press cuttings the College published in conjunction with its Annual Report of 1869–1870 implies at this stage much pragmatism and realism about position and prospects, not only in terms of the value of the organist's calling but how the College, as an institution, needed to negotiate with care an ambiguous professional market in which the lack of a voucher of musical ability did not necessarily – and perhaps never could – indicate incompetency.Footnote ⁷⁹

The College nonetheless turned its attention to nurturing a national presence and to evolving a system of accreditation that could measure and condone competency in the organ loft and thereby confer dignity. The journey to the event of 1904 recounted at the start of this article had commenced. Various initiatives came and went in the College's early years, but it is in the early activities of examining (in particular) and lecturing that the institution increasingly defined its self-improving remit. The low numbers of examination candidates in Limpus's period mounted to well over 300 candidates per session in the early years of the new century, the step-changes to this statistic being clearly aligned to the implementation of a comprehensive two-tier diploma structure in the early 1880s, the acquisition of the Charter in 1893 and the arrival in South Kensington in 1904. In many ways, the College's growing national presence, professionally and educationally speaking, can be adumbrated by its accommodation arrangements between 1864 and 1904: temporary arrangements at Freemasons’ Hall; a sequence of addresses in Bloomsbury, an area associated with charities, education, and reforming institutions;Footnote ⁸⁰ and the commencement of a long-term tenancy in South Kensington, a newly developed area of cultural and educational importance.

Understanding that growing influence between 1864 and 1904 depends on an investigation of how the College – as a professional association, finally chartered but unable to operate as a regulatory body through statute – succeeded in manufacturing its own business. This it managed to do by gradually nurturing affinity and loyalty amongst a broad constituency of organ practitioners, one characterized by differing levels of aspiration and achievement. Generating itself relatively quickly out of the confines of the vestry and the atmosphere of the masonic meeting room, the College identified its field of influence and it eventually learnt how to be successful in constructing a self-benefiting consensus that drew organists to membership and many of them to certification.Footnote ⁸¹