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
