Christmas in the Thirties

The Boy and the Radio

One day, when the boy was about 8 years old, there was great excitement in the house. Father had bought, second-hand, for they were very expensive, a marvelous machine called a radio. There was a black box with mysterious dials on the front, and a great horn which sat on top of the box, for the sound to come out. It needed two big, heavy batteries about a foot long and ten inches high, called "B" batteries, and a smaller one called a "C" battery. And it needed a car battery as well. It only worked well in the wintertime, and even then, sometimes the sound would fade away and people would stick their heads into the horn to try and hear their program. In the summer, the reception was very poor, and besides, folks needed the car battery for their cars once the snow melted and the roads dried up.

June 20, 1932

A Boy's Story

This is the story of a boy who loved pipe organs - "the sound of the soul."

One day the boy saw an article and a picture of a pipe organ built by the students in the technical shop of a school in England. They used a book called "How to Build a Two Manual Pipe Organ" by H.F. Milne.

Remembering Stuart Kolbinson

by David Berry, December 2000

In late November, Victoria lost its greatest lover of the organ as a musical instrument, one of Canada's foremost exponents of organ-building lore and history, and the owner and custodian for nearly half a century of one of western Canada's largest pipe organs.

Stuart Kolbinson was born in Merid, Saskatchewan in 1919. His family were pioneers who broke the sod in one of Canada's last agricultural frontiers near the Saskatchewan/Alberta border. Stuart inherited the strong cultural interest of his parents: his father Stephen was an enthusiastic music lover who, after years of struggle through the Great Depression, became a prominent collector of stringed instruments and owner of the famous Amati quartet now in the possession of the University of Saskatchewan.

Stuart Kolbinson, 1919 - 2000

text, Valla Eiriksson  Nov. 2000 

Stuart was a remarkable man, always studying. He was a master storyteller, craftsman, historian, philosopher, musician, linguist, pipe-organ builder, farmer, Pipe Major, businessman, and a collector of anything that had been made by hand and was part of a tradition. He believed that to really understand something, one had to become an expert, learning the origins, the psychology, and all the fine details of its history. He applied this philosophy to every aspect of his life. The unusual facet to this, is that Stuart always shared what he had learned with others, bringing people into his projects and dreams as co-creators.

Notes on Iceland, ca 1990

Organ as Literature ca 1982  David Berry

Two recent recitals in Victoria -- Patrick Wedd at St. Paul's and Edward Norman at St. John's -- were made even more pleasurable by the interesting and even, at times, eccentric material that was chosen. It was a welcome change.

Most organ recital programs are dull. Historically authentic and eclectic they may be, but the compulsion to play only serious and intellectually demanding works or major classics has the effect of seriously narrowing the choice of repertoire from all periods.

An Amazing Oversight

It's no secret that everything is going to pot these days. Pick up a newspaper or magazine, turn on your TV set, listen to the radio ---- pollution, crime, drugs, inflation, strikes, artificial additives to our food, and so on and on.

Physicists tell us that to every action there is an equal and positive re-action. So we have anti-pollution groups, anti-crime, anti-drug, anti-strike, and natural food organizations. Like all good citizens of our great democracy, I heartily approve of these organizations.........provided, of course, that they don't affect my standard of living.

Yes, it is our duty to be anti-something, but we should be consistent, don't you agree? I am thinking in particular of those good folks who are getting more recruits to their ranks every day, to wit: the Natural Food People. It is to these fine citizens that I am about to reveal my dread secret, which has hitherto been kept in darkness by who knows what sinister interests. The secret is this:

Tone Developing in the Labial Pipe

According to the study of Fletcher & Thwaites (Scientific Monthly Jan '83 ed), lip offset effect diagram p 102, "if the lip were exactly centred on the jet, the pipe would deliver only the fundamental frequency and the third harmonic. With the lip offset at the location shown (ie slightly to the outside of the centre of the wind jet), the second and fourth harmonics are introduced, greatly enriching the quality of sound."

It would appear Fletcher & Thwaites were speaking only of cylindrical pipes, though one would suspect that if their conclusions were correct, the same would hold true for wooden "rectangular" pipes as opposed to cylindrical.