Look out for Leitmotifs!

Look out for Leitmotifs!

Usually the subject of my blog is a coincidental experience which happened some time ago.  But today I want to tell you about a leitmotif which started this month during Christian Aid Week (12 – 18 May) and is not due to end until tomorrow!

By ‘leitmotif’ I mean a series of coincidences.  The Oxford Dictionary defines it as ‘a recurrent theme in a musical or literary work’.  The ‘leit’ part comes from the German ‘leiten’ – ‘to lead.’  So, what was the recurrent theme that I was being led to notice?  Answer:  Church organists - and all we owe to them.

Tomorrow Paul Cohen, our Prestwick Kingcase Church organist, is to receive a certificate, marking his wonderful achievement of sixty years’ service.  Here he is – smiling cheerfully as usual. 

Let us pause for a moment to think of all the work of church organists.

Every Sunday they turn up at church for one, two or even three services.  During the previous week they prepare the hymns chosen by the preacher, and if there is a church choir, they will have spent an evening preparing the singers for Sunday worship.  They decide on music to play as the congregation arrives and departs, also pieces for the collection of the offering and for the serving of Communion bread and wine. Then, of course, they make a very important contribution to both weddings and funerals, perhaps after spending hours practising the music requested by the families concerned.  By guiding us through the hymn tunes, they help us to express vocally our deepest emotions of joy and sorrow, and to feel part of the Christian community.  How many hundreds – no, thousands! – of people Paul must have helped in that way over the course of sixty years!

And now, back to this year’s Christian Aid Week.

Wednesday 15 May.  My friend Glenn delivered a letter to me from a lady who attends Girvan North Church, where he is currently serving as locum preacher.  (Girvan is on the Clyde coast, about 24 miles south of Prestwick, my home town.) 

Glenn had kindly promoted my book Joyful Witness in the church pew leaflet.  On seeing my surname, several elderly members realised that I was the daughter-in-law of Robert Bates, their former organist and choirmaster, who died in 1979.  The lady (Irene) had written: ‘For many years I enjoyed being in Mr Bates’ choir.  He was lovely man, and how he loved his choir!’

Thursday 16 May.  On my morning door-to-door collection for Christian Aid, I was delighted when a friendly lady opened her front door, waving her filled envelope.  “I saw you coming!” she said.  Then, peering at the collector’s badge on my jacket, she asked,”Are you by any chance the daughter of Mr Robert Bates, who used to teach me piano and singing on Saturday mornings in Ayr?”  When I explained that I was, in fact, his daughter-in-law, the lady (Mary) asked me in for a chat.

She was surprised to learn that Mr Bates had lived in Girvan, only coming to Ayr on Saturdays to visit his elderly father and to teach a few local pupils.  As she told me how she had enjoyed her singing lessons, I realised that this was the second time within 24 hours that someone had ‘sung the praises’ of my 40-yeqrs-dead father-in-law!  A strange, intense feeling, which reminded me of the last verse of the poem Heraclitus.

‘And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest, Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake, For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.’

Warming to the subject, I told Mary more details about her teacher.  He was born in 1903 in the little mining village of Lethanhill in the Doon valley, high above the other villages of Patna, Waterside and Dalmellington.  All four villages, built on the South  Ayrshire coalfield, supplied workers for the Dalmellington Ironworks.  On his fourteenth birthday Robert left school and was sent down the local mine – which he hated!  Fortunately, the daughter of the local headmaster loved music and had an organ brought up the steep “incline” – on a horse-drawn cart!  Robert eagerly learned to play it, and in 1919, at the age of sixteen, was appointed organist and choirmaster at Waterside church.

Four years later he moved to Girvan as organist and choirmaster of St Andrews Church, then latterly of Girvan North Church. Here he is, playing for a wedding.  The fact that it is a colour photo – plus his white hair - suggests that it was taken in the late 1960s or the 1970s.

On the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of his arrival in Girvan he was presented with grateful testimonial certificates.  However, he did not quite reach his sixtieth anniversary, as he died, in Ayr’s Heathfield Hospital, just one month before his seventy-sixth birthday.  But, faithful to the last, he played the hymns for the hospital’s Sunday service only four days before his death.

Mary had listened with interest to all this information.  “Isn’t it strange,” she remarked, “I never knew that Mr Bates was an organist – and yet my uncle and two of his sons were all church organists!”

Friday 17 May.  After completing my collection of envelopes, I took them to Diane, our Christian Aid organiser.  I told her about the coincidences concerning my father-in-law.  There was a silence...

 Then Diane exclaimed “That is absolutely astonishing!  Do you know, Kathleen, my uncle was the organist at Waterside Church for 60 years!  Look, here on my iPhone I have a photo of the newspaper cutting about the sixty-years’ service certificate he got from the Church of Scotland.  I showed this to our minister, and he has applied for the same certificate for Paul!  Isn’t that amazing?”

Well, yes indeed! And now I hope that tomorrow I’ll be there to witness Paul receiving his well-deserved Diamond Anniversary certificate – for his own kind of Christian Aid.

Deo gratias