Midlothian: Crichton Collegiate Church
Joseph Brook and Co, 1899 — organ surveyed May 2025
The lack of any available floor space within the building may well have unwittingly presented Joseph Brook with a welcome opportunity in the planning of his instrument. The requirement for an internal vestibule to serve the western entrance doors offered him an ideal location for an instrument immediately above. With the advantage of a large reflective stone surface behind, and speaking without restriction along the axis of a resonant building, the prospects of a favourable musical outcome seemed certain.
A relatively shallow available depth, and the need for the console to be placed at ground level, influenced the technical approach. With only a modest aperture available through which all connections could pass upwards from the console to the instrument above, Brook chose to make use of pneumatic action for both pedal soundboard and manual slider control mechanisms. No space was available within the console for the provision of even the most basic composition action, although the helpful setting out of all drawstops in a single row above the Swell keys largely compensates for such an absence. Access to the rear of the console for maintenance purposes is via panels within the vestibule.
Within the organ itself, a substantial double rise reservoir (feeders surviving and restored) resides at floor level, and this is framed at either end by two fifteen-note exhaust pneumatic soundboards for the Pedal Bourdon (planted in C/C# sides respectively). Manual soundboards above (Swell behind Great) are separated by a modest passage board, with planting for both being in sides for the lowest twenty notes, and chromatic thereafter. The fifteen speaking basses of the Open Diapason in the case front are operated pneumatically.
Other than the use of zinc for the case front pipes, plain metal features predominantly internally, with spotted metal reserved for both soft strings on the Swell, and for the bass octave resonators of the 1879 Cornopean, as remade by the Willis firm in 2012 to facilitate their accommodation on a spare slide which had remained unoccupied for over a century.