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Noel Bonavia-Hunt - Part 2: His work and legacy
Colin Pykett
"... transfixed in wonderment at the workings of his own mind ..."
Posted:
23 July 2024
Abstract. Noel Bonavia-Hunt is known mainly for his work associated with the organ, but he was also active in many other fields including early radio and electronics, chess problems, musical composition, voice production, medicine and Latin verse. However only in the last was he professionally qualified. He practised as an amateur in the other fields having undertaken no recognised form of tuition or training relevant to any of them. Nevertheless this did not inhibit him from publishing prolifically, and within each topic he thereby attracted an audience. However it was his bizarre activities as an unqualified practitioner of medicine which most starkly demonstrate his approach to his work. Blissfully unaware of his limitations, some of his stories are so implausible that one wonders whether he was more than merely eccentric, and one therefore cannot help questioning the reality of his accounts.
Against this can be set the fact that some of his work regarding the organ was undoubtedly valuable. His extensive research on diapasons, which dominated his entire life, is of considerable interest. However he seemed to think that this and similar activities related to the other classes of organ tone (strings, flutes and reeds) somehow made him an expert voicer, whereas he had bypassed the years of careful training which a genuine practitioner would have undergone. Although from the age of twenty he embraced the habit of revoicing just about every organ he came across, it is unclear whence he had derived the necessary skills, what those skills actually amounted to in reality, why an inexperienced amateur was given so free a hand, and why all these instruments needed this level of attention in the first place.
It therefore seems astonishing that Hunt was able to wield such influence for so long over highly qualified and experienced professional musicians and organ builders, together with their customers. It is equally remarkable that these professions submitted so meekly to his instructions and advice.
For reasons of length this article is partitioned into two sections. Part 1 [1] deals with his life and times, and part 2 (this one) with his work and legacy.
Contents
This article focuses on Noel Bonavia-Hunt's work and legacy. It is a sequel to an earlier one [1] which was a biographical sketch to set his work in context. This partitioning was necessary since it would not have been practical to include everything within a single web page.
Although Hunt was active in many fields it is mainly his work in connection with the organ which is of relevance here and this will now be described in more detail. However, briefer coverage of his other pursuits is also included for completeness.
In the previous biographical sketch [1] we saw that Hunt's interest in the organ began while he was still in his teens at Leamington College. However his background in this and music more generally gets the barest of mentions in his autobiography beyond that he "had a course of organ lessons" while at Leamington. Moreover, since he had yet to actually construct anything related to organs, one wonders how such a youthful and wholly inexperienced author managed to launch himself into print on precisely that subject in Musical Opinion while still at school. Perhaps his parental publishing connections might have helped? In fact, it is worth a brief digression into the wider role his redoubtable father might have played in terms of oiling the wheels of his son's journey through life. One cannot discount the probably wide ecclesiastical influence of Hunt senior in the diocese of London, where he had developed an early and considerable reputation following his rescue of the formerly rundown church of St Paul's, Kilburn. Here he became a powerful orator who drew huge congregations and it would not be surprising if these achievements had attracted the bishop's attention. His founding of Trinity College would undoubtedly have helped cement his musical reputation in the metropolis, together with his noteworthy qualifications (bachelor's degree from Oxford; doctorate from Dublin). He was also elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in connection with his research into musical history, a considerable achievement. Thus he was certainly a force to be reckoned with. However, in an otherwise self-congratulatory autobiography, his son offers few clues as to the level of his own musical proficiency or how he might have achieved it. Might we therefore be justified in regarding him as a competent amateur at best? There is no implied criticism here, but it would be nice to know.
But now that we have reached this point let us clear some ground before proceeding. I need to explain my view that Hunt's opinion of his own abilities, particularly in relation to the voicing of organ pipes, was exaggerated. As we have seen already, he claimed to have revoiced several organs in Oxford while at university from 1903, when he was twenty, to 1905. Throughout his life, judging by his own writings, he could scarcely pass an organ by without leaping inside to revoice it. Yet prior to Oxford he had had no experience whatever in organ building. Those years had been spent either at school or full time work in banking. Yet, then as now, any voicer worthy of the name would have risen through an apprenticeship or other form of training lasting several years before being let loose on the pipes of a customer's instrument. But the organ brotherhood is a generally polite and charitable one so it is perhaps unsurprising that criticisms are usually sparse and muted, and this applies to the sporadic remarks which have surfaced about Hunt over the years. His interventions were obviously tolerated at the time and they have aroused little comment since. However I might quote an author and organ building professional whose opinions are widely respected. Stephen Bicknell has written of him, with some implied understatement, that "one cannot help feeling uneasy at his attempts to tackle wider issues of tonal architecture, ensemble and blend. His own opinion of his skill as a voicer is poorly supported by the instruments that passed through his hands" [2]. And in part 1 of this article we noted that another (albeit anonymous) opinion of his efforts at Great Gaddesden was less restrained [3]. Over several decades I have myself studied sound production in organ pipes, including teasing out the physics underlying voicing adjustments. There are several articles on the subject elsewhere on this website (e.g. [5]). But that does not make me a voicer and I would not for a moment claim otherwise.
Apart from voicing, what were Hunt's other contributions to organ building? It is fair to say that there were several. Firstly we need to look at his publications where he wrote about ten monographs and books on organ construction and tonal matters, and this alone is something of an achievement. Listed in no particular order these are:
Studies in Organ Tone
All can still be obtained either as originals or facsimile editions, and most if not all are worth reading. However there is considerable overlap and repetition among them, and as Hunt himself considered "The Modern British Organ" to be his magnum opus it is sufficient to limit ourselves to reviewing this for conciseness [4]. Classical scholar that he was, Hunt prefaced the book with a Latin inscription which translates as "let these organs overwhelm your ears with the sounds of many pipes, made by a craftsman with astonishing skill".
"Modern" in the title of the work refers, of course, to its publication date of 1947, something to be kept in mind while reading both the book itself and what follows here. Voicing occupies a chapter of some twenty pages, but in view of the remarks above there would be little point dwelling on it. Suffice to say that this section is best regarded merely as an introduction to a subject that cannot be learnt from any book. It includes a rather endearing photograph of Hunt in middle life voicing a diapason pipe while clad in a clerical three-piece suit complete with watch chain and dog collar!
The section in the book on diapasons is interesting in that Hunt devoted more of his working lifetime, by a large margin, to this class of organ tone than to any other. This is reflected by the chapters devoted to strings, flutes and reeds which are all only about half as long. In fact it is through his research on diapasons that he became best known, with much of what he said remaining worth reading today. In his book he presents harmonic analyses of various flue pipes including two varieties of diapason, and I mention this because at the time of publication such data were rare. In those days it was difficult and time consuming to obtain the raw numbers, and the necessary electronic equipment (a harmonic analyser built entirely in analogue hardware using valves) was temperamental and expensive. However, a criticism here, and indeed of the entire book, is that he failed to give credit to his sources of information. Even when he mentions names, he seldom supplies references from which readers could turn up the source material. (Audsley had the same habit). But in the case of his harmonic spectra he does not even mention names. The fact is that, in the 1940s, there was probably only a single reputable paper in the entire scientific literature from which he could have copied the information [6], since he would probably not have been in a position to have done the measurements himself.
Hunt invented a useful eight-fold classification scheme for stops of the diapason family, and for each type he describes examples in detail. He then goes on to discuss various sub-types within the main groupings, an example of which he called "miniature diapasons" such as the dulciana, salicional diapason and gemshorn stops. It would be an injustice to Hunt to attempt a summary of this lengthy chapter in the book, since it is of considerable value and deserves a complete reading. I found Hunt's writings helpful in my own work on diapason tone and how it has evolved over the centuries [7].
As mentioned already, similar chapters follow which deal with string stops, flutes and reeds respectively. Although the material in these cases does not quite descend into the detail which Hunt devotes to diapasons, it is similarly useful. The book then moves on to a detailed discussion of organ mechanism, though here it can reasonably be said that the treatment is rather like the curate's egg - good in parts. Anyone desiring a description of how the pneumatic and electric organ actions of his day worked would best be advised to look elsewhere, since the narrative is either vague and incomplete or excessively detailed. For example, while meticulous drawings are provided for Willis's "infinite speed and gradation" swell mechanism and his electric combination capture system (both of 1930s vintage), neither are described properly in the text. In the former case Hunt rather casts enquirers adrift by suggesting that "the reader may digest [the diagram] at his leisure". At the opposite extreme, examples of the excessive detail just mentioned relate to organ mechanisms invented by two gentlemen named Horace Clarke and H W Homer. Both were amateur organ builders who had designed and made complicated and ingenious one-of-a-kind electric actions for their house organs. Clarke is thought to have been a mechanical engineer, and Homer was a chemist by profession who collaborated with Hunt in writing their joint book The Organ Reed. It is curious why Hunt reported the work of unknown amateurs in such detail when he was simultaneously mentioning the methods used by professional organ builders only a few pages away, but in a cursory manner. He did the same thing elsewhere and it results in a somewhat lopsided aspect to his book.
This brings us onto his activities in amateur organ building more generally. Perhaps the most extreme instance which Hunt himself indulged in was at Stagsden where he became vicar from 1937 until he retired in 1955. Shortly after his arrival he persuaded the owner of a car repair business in the area, the aptly-named Sydney Bonnett, to help him install a new pneumatic action as well as building a new console. Mr Bonnett had no previous experience of organ building, but that did not trouble Hunt who wrote that he "was not slow in suggesting to [Bonnett] the idea of our undertaking the work of rebuilding the organ ourselves without the assistance and expense of an organ-builder". It is not straightforward to establish exactly what was done to the instrument during Hunt's eighteen-year incumbency because it underwent several evolutions, but despite Hunt's remark about doing without an organ builder the firm of Kingsgate Davidson nevertheless seemed to be involved on more than one occasion. The organ in two of its incarnations is described in the National Pipe Organ Register (references [8] and [9]). Since then the present instrument at Stagsden has been considerably enlarged and modified, mainly prompted by subsequent water damage to the previous one.
To some extent the instrument became a test bed for Hunt's tonal and mechanical ideas, some of which were unusual. With customary panache he wrote that "in the end we were able to present the church with a really fine instrument. It became a household word among organ devotees, and I constantly received visitors, some even from America and New Zealand, to 'try' and to hear the instrument". But without wishing to be hypercritical, the reality was that it was devoid of pedigree, consisting of bits and pieces ranging from drawstop knobs to pipework, some of which had been donated. In fairness, it has to be said that trying to carry out major work to any organ at that period just before, during and after the second world war was at least very difficult and at worst doomed to failure. Labour, particularly skilled labour, was in short supply owing to the conscription of all able-bodied young men save those in reserved occupations (of which organ building was not one), and shortage of materials was endemic across the country. After the war materials shortages continued well into the 1950s, being magnified by government legislation to prioritise exports since the country was virtually bankrupt. Thus organ builders had a hard time of it, encouraging those who wished to build or modify instruments to follow the alternative, do it yourself, route as Hunt did.
Radio broadcasting (often called "wireless" in the UK) began in the 1920s with the birth of the BBC and Hunt rapidly became an enthusiastic amateur radio constructor at that time, contributing articles over many years to hobby periodicals of the day such as Wireless World, Amateur Wireless and Wireless Magazine. He also expanded his interests into electronics more widely with audio amplifiers and related equipment. Reading his articles shows that, once again, his zeal was focused in the same way as in his organ work - limited knowledge and experience in a highly technical field where he was an amateur did not inhibit his enthusiasm nor lead him to question his own competence. Consequently he was sometimes taken quite severely to task by acknowledged specialists such as Peter Baxandall and James Moir writing in the correspondence columns of these and other magazines, though when challenged he would seldom admit his failings. Instead he would retreat behind a wall of denial, issuing flabby statements such as "I maintain my position against all criticism". This reflected the classic default position not unexpected of one whose day job dealt with dogma rather than fact, and we have seen it surface already in the other activities he undertook. Although he would issue corrections to his articles from time to time, it was probably more as a result of editorial compulsion than choice on his part. He seldom trespassed into the mathematics underlying circuit design, but when he did he quickly got out of his depth which again required subsequent corrections to be published. All these things created difficulties for readers, particularly if they were actively following serialised constructional articles, something which would have reflected negatively onto the magazine in question. Mostly Hunt relied on vague, qualitative thinking which is not a sound basis for competent design in this field. At best, he was merely a seat-of-the-pants amateur electronics enthusiast whose approach could be summarised by the phrase "don't confuse me with facts; my mind is made up". On one occasion he even referred to Osborne Peasgood, who became acting organist at Westminster Abbey in the early 1940s, as an authority on the design of gramophone pickups, which I suggest would have been rather unlikely.
So in this field Hunt typified, yet again, the approach of a noisy, forceful and unapologetic amateur in his contributions to the hobby in that era, with his undoubted enthusiasm being probably a factor enabling him to get into print at all. But the interests of readers of those publications were better served by authors with professional credentials, of which there were several at that time.
Hunt's interest in medicine and the extent to which he pursued it is without doubt the most bizarre aspect of his life and work. Only the briefest summary is appropriate here, sufficient to justify this statement, so those wishing to form their own opinions are directed to his autobiography where it surfaces in several places [10]. Initially, he relates how he "became madly interested in medicine", having concocted an emulsion with which he treated a variety of skin conditions. He expects us to believe that even qualified doctors would approach him, sometimes in the street, either to discuss their patients' problems or to seek other advice. He undertook invasive procedures, such as inserting a Eustachian catheter "without the least discomfort on the patient's part". He did not report the patient's view however. It seems that he had a cousin in the trade who supplied him with this and other surgical instruments "at surgeons' prices". We are further told that qualified practitioners would hand their stethoscopes to him for an opinion, and he advised one of them on treating nose bleeds with his own remedy who "thereafter consulted him on all his cases". He claimed to have brought a baby back from the brink of death after its own doctor had declared the case hopeless. Hunt achieved this feat by prescribing yet another of his own nostrums.
The reality is that he was probably acting illegally [11], and some of his stories (hinted at above) are so implausible that one begins to wonder whether he was rather more than merely eccentric. Irrespective of how well-intentioned he might have been, regarding him as nothing more than a quack is both correct and inescapable. It was not until I came across this aspect of Hunt's activities, together with the entirely uncritical way he narrated it, that I realised for the first time what a strange character he was. I could not resist borrowing a quotation by John Gray, written in connection with someone else, which feels apposite: he seemed to be "transfixed in wonderment at the workings of his own mind" [13].
The one area where Hunt was professionally qualified gets relatively slight treatment in his autobiography. He left Oxford with a degree in classics in 1905, but it was not until 1950 that he returned to it by taking up a study of the Roman poets. By then he was 67 and still vicar at Stagsden. Since he himself downplayed this work, those wishing to know more are best directed to the few relevant pages in his autobiography [10]. He published a book on the subject in 1954 [12].
Hunt developed an interest in chess from an early age and was well into composing problems for publication in the Boys' Own Paper while still at Leamington College. While vicar at Stagsden he continued these activities with renewed vigour, and by the time he compiled his autobiography during retirement in 1959 he estimated that he had composed some 750 problems which he published in no less than six books. On his death these were bequeathed to the British Chess Problem Society. As with his other pursuits, it was through a strategy of vigorous publication that he became well known in this field.
Hunt published a few amateur musical compositions, though he was uncharacteristically diffident in referring to them as "rather scant incursions into this branch of the fine arts". His output was mainly limited to sacred music, including a few hymn tunes and straightforward pieces for organ.
On a wider front he was also interested in voice production and training. One of his more notable ventures was the development of an artificial "voice pipe", an attempt to simulate the human vocal tract using an air-driven acoustic apparatus. It was described in the book The Voice of the Mind by E Herbert-Caesari which, though long out of print, is still obtainable and attracts favourable reviews to this day. However, elsewhere we find one of his more questionable and curious statements, namely that "the well-voiced Vox Humana [organ stop] can give points to many a modern vocalist who could do with a little revoicing on his own account" [4]. I suspect there are few organists and voice trainers who would agree, either then or today!
Hunt is known mainly for his work associated with the organ, but he was also active in many other fields including early radio and electronics, chess problems, musical composition, voice production, medicine and Latin verse. However only in the last was he professionally qualified. He practised as an amateur in the other fields, having undertaken no recognised form of tuition or training relevant to any of them. Nevertheless this did not inhibit him from publishing prolifically, and within each topic he thereby attracted an audience. However it was his bizarre activities as an unqualified practitioner of medicine which most starkly demonstrate his approach to his work. Blissfully unaware of his limitations, some of his stories are so implausible that one wonders whether he was more than merely eccentric, and one therefore cannot help questioning the reality of his accounts.
Against this can be set the fact that some of his work regarding the organ was undoubtedly valuable. His extensive research on diapasons, which dominated his entire life, is of considerable interest. However he seemed to think that this and similar activities related to the other classes of organ tone (strings, flutes and reeds) somehow made him an expert voicer, whereas he had bypassed the years of careful training which a genuine practitioner would have undergone. Although from the age of twenty he embraced the habit of revoicing just about every organ he came across, it is unclear whence he had derived the necessary skills, what those skills actually amounted to in reality, why an inexperienced amateur was given so free a hand, and why all these instruments needed this level of attention in the first place.
It therefore seems astonishing that Hunt was able to wield such influence for so long over highly qualified and experienced professional musicians and organ builders, together with their customers. It is equally remarkable that these professions submitted so meekly to his instructions and advice.
1.
"Noel Bonavia-Hunt - Part 1: his life and
times", an article on this website
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