I am just about set for the organ removal from Newington Green Unitarian church to re-install the instrument in the parish church of Vermenton in the Yonne region of France. I have been making use of the skills I acquired from a tiny fragment of an apprenticeship with Harrison & Harrison of Durham and a three-year course in harpsichord making at the London College of Furniture from 1978 until 1981. I am not a professional organ builder, but I concentrate on doing what I can do well, namely the experience I had with a tuner working for Harrison’s who taught me about the nuts and bolts of overhauling, repairing and tuning organs. My first and most ambitious “job” was a 1913 Arthur Harrison organ from Holy Trinity Fareham which I installed in the old abbey church of San Martino al Cimino near Viterbo in 1995 after it had been in storage at my old seminary since 1991.

My organ work has been considerably reduced over the past twenty years, but some priests of a religious community I got to know during my diaconal stint in the Morvan have asked me to find and install an organ in the large medieval (heavily restored in the nineteenth century) church of Vermenton.

I have various resources for finding redundant organs in England, and I was precisely seeking a two-manual instrument with mechanical action, easy to dismantle and reassemble with a minimum of repairs or restoration and which can be transported in a 3 1/2 ton van which can be driven with a car licence. The typical specification involves four or five stops on each manual and a bourdon on the pedal. As I corresponded with those responsible for disposing of organs, the “successful” one is in Newington Green Unitarian church. I am due to be there with my hired van in the third week of January to take the organ down and bring it to France.

Newington Green Unitarian church is a handsome eighteenth-century building which underwent some modifications in 1860.

Here is the organ I am to move.

The instrument is basically Victorian, installed at Newington Green in 1902. It bears the builder’s plate of Henry Potter. The instrument was examined in the 1970’s by Noel Mander, a highly reputable London organ builder, who had no knowledge of Potter. Mr Mander surmised that Potter was a journeyman working for Bishop & Son. Manders did some work on the instrument, and when the bellows was opened, they found out that this instrument was built by Banfield of Birmingham in 1862, for Lord Calthorpe of Elvetham Hall. It is without any real tonal distinction, but I am confident that I could improve it by opening up the pipe feet a little to enhance the natural harmonics of the pipes. It was regularly tuned up to September 2016 and is still playable.

I plan to work from the Monday to the Friday morning so as to get back to Dover for the night ferry. Why are they disposing of this instrument? It is mainly because the church has received a grant for restoration of the building in a general state of wear and tear. I also suspect they will be removing the Victorian pews to create a more versatile space to be used for different social and cultural functions. They have a grand piano and use other instruments, and obviously have no need of an organ, which in any case would have to be dismantled for the work on the church. It will therefore have a new life in France.

This evening, I began to do some research on this community, because my father has spoken very kindly about one of his friends who is a Unitarian minister in Kendal. I also from time to time follow the blog of Adrian Worsfold, who is a Unitarian, which is more concerned with politics but occasionally discusses ecclesiastical eccentricities. I knew very little about Unitarianism, even though I had contact with the Quakers when I was at Wennington School in 1971. The two denominations are completely distinct. The name distinguishes them from Trinitarians, in that they deny the Trinity. There is one God, and Jesus was a good man and spiritual guide, but not God. In this, they are distinct from nearly all Christian denominations – approaching a more rigorous monotheistic notion of God like in Judaism and Islam. They also reject original sin, predestination and the inerrancy of the Bible. They are now the most liberal and radical of all Christian denominations. Unitarianism seems to be a reaction against some of the excesses of classical Protestantism. Its roots were in the mid sixteenth century in Transylvania and Poland. They faced fierce persecution from the Roman Catholic Church in continental Europe and the Anglican establishment in England.

One distinguished member of the Newington Green community was Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneer of feminism, wife of the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement and mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (who married Percy Byssh Shelley). Mary Shelley‘s best known work is Frankenstein. Unitarianism appealed to many Romantic authors and philosophers through its radical position in regard to establishment churches and dogmas. It seemed ideal for an anarchical mindset and a passionate desire to serve the cause of humanity and justice. Newington Green is located in the constituency of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has received considerable publicity for his involvement in the Parliament debates over Brexit. Here, Jeremy Corbyn is interviewed in the Newington Green church about Mary Wollstonecraft.

Like many of the Romantics, like William Wordsworth, Madame Wollstonecraft was inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution. She also saw the work of the hard-line Jacobins and the guillotine bloodbath – and quickly returned to England in fear for her life. Whatever we may think about left-wing politics today, it is interesting to see a politician’s ideas rooted in the depth of Romantic thought and the profound vision of a new world and age. With this in mind, the allegation of Mr Corbyn calling Theresa May a “stupid woman” with a sexist overtone is quite striking, especially as he affirmed that he eschews all sexism and misogyny.

Returning to Unitarianism as a philosophical expression or religion in a very restricted meaning of that word, I see many themes with which I can sympathise (though I am a Trinitarian – to the relief of my Bishop!). One is a great intellectual freedom in interpreting sacred texts and the notion of the human conscience. It is also a theme of various forms of liberalism and modernism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely arising from Romanticism.

The Newington Green community is quite surprising, now named New Unity. If you go to their site, you will be quite astonished by the fact that it defines itself as a non-religious church. I assume they are using the vocabulary of the average English person of our times, used to seeing religion as a source of intolerance, bigotry and violence. I assume that is what is meant. Also, they repudiate the idea of a supernatural God (what is “supernatural” for them – since I would soften the distinction made by classical theology between natural and supernatural). Anyway, let’s get ahead. It looks to me like a humanist philosophy aiming for the nobility of spirit I have often mentioned in my articles. Believe in Good, the idea being to seek the good in every person.