Frederick Rothwell (1853 – 1944) was a long-standing friend of the distinguished musician and composer Sir Henry Walford Davies (1869 – 1941). Like Walter Parratt, his old master at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, Walford Davies greatly admired Rothwell’s skill as a voicer and finisher. Before starting out on his own, Frederick Rothwell worked for fourteen years (1875 – 1889) as voicer and finisher for the notable London firm of Gray & Davison. It was during this time that Rothwell undertook work for Parratt at Magdalen College, Oxford. He then went on to carry out work for him at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, first with Gray & Davison and later on his own account. From Davies’s time as pupil-assistant to Parratt to his tenure as Parratt’s successor at St George’s, Windsor, Frederick Rothwell built or rebuilt all the organs with which Walford Davies was closely associated.
Rothwell’s rebuild of the Temple Church organ, in 1910, included a substantial amount of new pipework and also his patented stop-key control system, whereby stop-keys placed above each manual replaced the conventional stop-knobs on either side of the console. Walford Davies became an enthusiastic advocate of the Rothwell system which enabled the player, in Walford Davies’s own words, ‘to glide from stop-key to stop-key while still playing, without the slightest break in the musical thought and without the slightest turn of the head or any irrelevant muscular effort’. The system also won the admiration and praise of such leading organists as William Harris and George Thalben-Ball. Walford Davies had twin patent consoles installed in St George’s Chapel, Windsor in 1930, where Rothwell designed the organ in such a way to enable it to be played by two organists together and independently.
Walford Davies thought highly of the organ at St George’s, Headstone. In the 1930s, Hope Milton, daughter of the then Vicar of St George’s, had the task of bringing the key to the organ to Sir Walford whenever he called at the vicarage door:
‘We always enjoyed the arrival of WD at the front door. He was always very courteous, perhaps a little shy, but had a wonderful repartee with children. He started what must have been one of the first broadcasts aimed at encouraging children to actually enjoy singing , and when I heard his voice, I felt I was listening to a real friend.’
The Headstone organ was the largest instrument built by Rothwell entirely as new. Over the years it has seen only minor modification; all the Rothwell pipework remains intact and the console is the earliest of the dozen or so patent consoles still in use. The case, by Frederick Rothwell, is one of the few in Middlesex listed in Clutton and Niland’s 'The British Organ'. Included in the British Institute of Organ Studies’ register of historic instruments of importance to the national heritage, the organ, played by Roger Fisher, is featured on a CD tribute to Walford Davies, selected in the Editor’s Choice of 'Gramophone', October 2001.
