J. W. Walker & Sons Ltd

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J. W. Walker & Sons Ltd English organ builders established in 1838 by Joseph William Walker in London.

Notable initially for pleasing small church and barrel organs, Walker achieved a breakthrough with the order for a large three-manual instrument at Romsey Abbey in 1858, including a thirty-two foot Pedal Open Wood, an instrument still (2007) in substantially its original state, a recent renovation confirming its outstanding musical qualities.

Arguably, the heyday of the company occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century under the leadership of James John Walker (1846-1922), the younger son of Joseph William. The company developed a reputation in the 1890s for excellence in massive diapason voicing using scales and pressures for flue work greater than those used by Hill or Willis. The effect was rolling and magnificent. Notable instruments included London instruments at Holy Trinity Sloane Street and St Margaret's Westminster; cathedrals at York, Rochester and Bristol, and the organs at St Mary's, Portsea and St Matthew's Northampton. Walker also eventually rebuilt the Gray & Davison concert organ at the Crystal Palace, increasing its power to carry across the vast space of the central transept. The sequence of the church instruments continued into the twentieth century including the large instrument at the Roman Catholic church of The Sacred Heart, Wimbledon, built in 1912.

After James Walker's death, the reputation of the firm in the "first division" of British organ building lasted through the Second World War before the its star began to set somewhat. By the 1960s, British organ design had become not only eclectic but, to some ears, meekly derivative. The rebuild at Wimborne Minster in 1965 incorporated pipework from earlier periods beginning in 1664; the old material was made to sit with elements in vogue at the time of the Walker rebuild to create an organ whose character could be said to be either of all its history or properly representative of none of it, except perhaps 1965 itself. Later commentators have levelled harsh words at the 1960s "Jack-of-all-trades" British pipe organ without realizing that for the players of the day, such innovations drawn from European practice entirely outside the original scheme and character of the instruments, did at least open new avenues for players just getting used to attempt, for example, baroque performance practice.

Given enough money, the Walker firm could produce impressive, cogent and exciting new work, as at Liverpool's new Catholic cathedral (1967-8) (Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral). The instrument could be seen as a necessarily decisive response to the existing (and outstanding) instrument by Henry Willis III at the neighbouring Anglican cathedral, and recordings by several outstanding European players, including Jeanne Demessieux and Flor Peeters, were made there.

Eventually, a recognizable revival came to the Walker firm with its move, in stages, from west London to the small town of Brandon, on the Suffolk/Norfolk border, where the organ building firm and a parts supply business ("P & S") occupied modern workshops. In the 1980s, under the leadership of Robert Pennells, his German (Klais)-trained son Andrew, B. Q. S. F. Buchanan and head voicer Michael Butler, a number of new and prestigious instruments were made, including town hall organs at Bolton in 1985 (after a fire four years before which destroyed a famous 1874 Gray & Davison instrument) and, leading a group of instruments for export, at Adelaide (1989); at Lancing College Chapel in 1986-7 and several years later at London's St Martin-in-the-Fields. The visual effect of a number of the new instruments benefited considerably from the superb case-designs of David Graebe. Later organs included a Cavaillé-Coll-inspired instrument, built in 1995 at Exeter College, Oxford.

In 1999, Andrew Pennells died tragically, drawing his father out of retirement. Today, the business has four distinct parts under the umbrella of "The Walker Group": restoration work operating from premises in the Wiltshire town of Devizes; tuning, supplies to the trade and a small new-organbuilding practice in Brandon, from which diversity a further substantial revival may flow.

In terms of its artistic achievement there have so far been three valuable, yet discretely differing phases in the history of the company: