Sacred Heart High School needs to raise £257,000 to return to full playing condition the UK’s only known pipe organ by revered Belgian craftsman Hippolyte Loret.
Experts have identified the instrument in the school’s chapel as a long-lost gem.
Its provenance was revealed during a visit from an expert who says it is the UK’s only known pipe organ and was built in France.
Built by Belgian craftsman Hippolyte Loret, the organ was smuggled in the early 1900s to stop it being seized by the French government.
The school is holding a talk to raise funds for the repairs on February the 12th at 7pm.
It’s a remarkable story which began more than 160 years ago when the Society of the Sacred Heart in France commissioned Loret to build an organ for one of its Parisian school chapels.
Forty years later, the French government, hostile to religion, declared it would seize all the assets of the holy order.
An enterprising and courageous nun was determined to save the prized organ from the authorities’ clutches, and in 1904 had it covertly dismantled and shipped to London, where it was rebuilt in Sacred Heart’s chapel.
In modern times, dusty and disused, the organ was assumed to have been built at the same time as the school’s Grade II* chapel, until Royal Festival Hall organ curator William McVicker was commissioned to look.
“Expecting to be examining a disused English Victorian organ, he looked, stepped back and exclaimed: ‘No!’,” said Alex Dijkhuis from Sacred Heart high school, now helping publicise the restoration.
Greeting Dr McVicker was an organ stop which read ‘Flute Pyramidale’, one he’d only encountered once before, in an old church in Brussels. He was able to confirm that the Hammersmith organ is the only example of Loret’s work in the UK, and one of only a handful surviving in Europe.
