The organ at Wellington’s Cathedral of St Paul has suffered significant damage in Monday’s earthquake.
Director of music Michael Stewart said that while the cathedral appeared to have made it through unscathed the organ, worth millions of dollars, had suffered “significant damage”.
“We’ve spent the morning here picking pipes up off the floor and rearranging things. Basically the earthquake shook a lot of the pipes off brackets which have crashed onto other pipes, so it’s a bit of a mess at the moment to be honest,” Stewart said.
The large pipes caused a lot of damage. We’re very lucky that this did not occur at another time and that no-one was hurt,” he said.
The original organ was built by the English firm of T C Lewis and Company, and installed in Old St. Paul’s in 1877.
It was a fine example of that famous builder’s work, and was a two-manual tracker blown by a water engine.
It was rebuilt and enlarged in the 1930s by Lawton and Osborne of Auckland. A new choir organ was added, and the tracker action was replaced by exhaust pneumatic.
In 1964 the organ was moved to the new Cathedral by George Croft and Son of Auckland where it served the Cathedral music until 1976 when Crofts were entrusted with the work of rebuilding and enlarging the instrument to cathedral proportions.
“It has withstood everything from then until now. It’s too early to say how much it will cost to repair the organ.
Some parts will be salvageable, other parts are completely destroyed, bent out of recognition,” Stewart said.
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