Introduction
By Phil Benson
By now, Robbie, many other MMD members and I have sent quite a few messages back and forth trying to sort out a little problem of *readability* of international text in order to be able to post the Fair Organ Preservation Society's Coming Events Booklet and list of museums. With this in mind, I thought I'd better present myself properly to you all.
I was born ..... well, we'll skip that bit. As another hobby of mine is genealogy I could bore you to tears with "My uncle's uncle was Molotov" (He was, but that's another story.)
I'm a qualified electrical engineer who gave up on electrics and went into pumping some years ago and also decided that a job in selling might be nice - so I combined the two. I'm still in selling some 20 or so years later.
My continuing interest in mechanical music stems from a school holiday outing to Holland. We travelled from England via France and Belgium and, on the way, stopped at a road-side cafe for a break. The funny looking juke-box in the corner ate a lot of my pocket money. As a member of the "Beatles" age who arranged trips to see them for my school friends, being entranced by a cafe-organ was not exactly cool as far as my friends were concerned. I spent a small fortune on the way back, too.
I had, in fact been introduced to fair organs before then when I was still a very young boy. I live in the Midlands and a local park contained a funfair with, by then, dilapidated rides and an organ that was badly in need of repair. As I grew older, the fair stopped riding and the organ stopped playing and, by the time I was getting two digits in my age, it was derelict.
One day, I was there with my family and my late father and I walked around the fair watching it being broken up - literally - and burnt. The fair was being removed to make way for something else. As a fan of the organ in its better days, I asked "Hey, mister, does it still work?" The reply indicated that it did - just - and a horribly out-of-tune and only partly rendered book, itself in tatters, was his gift to me. Luckily, the organ front was saved, in the main, and it now adorns a replacement organ well known in these parts. The organ itself was burned as I watched; the pipes being thrown onto the bonfire that had once been a wooden scenic ride. Years later, my flesh crawled as I held a photograph of that same ride taken no more than a week before it was destroyed.
I have similar piles of damaged wood in my workshop that used be musical instruments. I took one of them apart about four years ago - it's still waiting to be restored. My excuse is that I'm too busy doing work for the Fair Organ Preservation Society (FOPS hereafter). I joined the Committee in, er, well quite a long time ago. I wanted to do something to change the perception of many members of it being elitist. I doubt I have - I'm probably seen in a similar light myself now.
Anyway, during my spell so far I've spent about 3 years doing the rounds of the rally fields providing a Society sales stand where we sold cassettes, postcards and a mass of other mech music associated items produced by the FOPS. I acted as membership secretary from 1987 until 1990, writing the Society's column in the weekly fairground newspaper, World's Fair for about a year at the same time. I transferred the paper listings I received into a database at the same time. I took over as editor of The Key Frame, the FOPS quarterly magazine, in January 1991.
This time of year I'm particularly busy in the job: an edition of the magazine, collating the Coming Events Booklet, the AGM minutes from last year, notice and information for this year's AGM in March, designing vouchers for money off entry fees to rallies and museums for members, and advertisements for the Society's Mail Order sales have been sent off today. A couple of weeks for the printers to do their job, and John Page (no, not Jon Page), the current membership secretary, and I will spend a day locked in my office stuffing 1,000 copies of each item plus other advertising flyers into 1,000 brown envelopes before John carts them away to be posted. Three weeks off, and I start the process of putting the next magazine together.
As I hinted at the beginning, I've sent the Coming Events Booklet and list of museums to Robbie for onwards transmission. When the problem of international symbols has been sorted, no doubt it will be made available to you. It lists events and sites all over the world, so I'm interested in others to include in the future.
Just so that I don't get bored, I play on a Garrett showman's tractor of 1920 during the summer rally season and through into the Christmas season. A fellow Rotarian, John Wootton, owns this engine, a 56-key Bursens organ and a 1920s showman's living wagon which we display at rallies. My wife, Sue, and my daughters, Sarah and Alice, do most of the polishing with John's sister, Angela, while John and I get up steam and do the oiling. Bacon butties and lots of tea get us through the morning until we can use the oven at the front (I think it's called a smoke box, really) to cook meat and a number of veg for lunch. I get to listen to the organ all day and play on a traction engine - good, eh?
As the rally season winds down, Sue and I get withdrawal symptoms so, seven years ago, we started arranging a get-together at our home in mid-September. As many organ owners as want set up camp on our garden and the field alongside and play to anyone who will listen. To begin with, it was just something we put on ourselves; it's an official FOPS event now. There's no charge and no-one gets a fee for bringing their organ - it's just for fun and sociability. As we live in a lock keepers cottage on the Coventry Canal, we get a few curious visitors from the boats that pass by. We've gained a few members that way, too. This year it's 20-21 September. Please send me an e-mail if you want to come and need more details. You are all more than welcome to come and see the kind of person who waffles on like this!
I've only been aware of the MMD since the beginning of February, but I'm totally hooked. Keep it up, Jody and Robbie, and keep the comments coming.
Phil Benson
[ Jody recommends that we place the FOPS "Coming Events" file on the
[ MMD web site at http://www.foxtail.com . As a web page created with
[ HTML all the foreign characters will be preserved. It's preface will
[ have a suitable statement explaining that FOPS holds the copyright and
[ that it's not to be copied except for personal use, and so on, and it
[ will also tell how to get information on joining FOPS, etc. Other web
[ sites will be invited to place pointers. How does this sound?
[ -- Robbie
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(Message sent Sun 16 Feb 1997, 23:54:31 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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