by Christine Trevett
When I was at school at the start of the 1960s one of the books we had to study for the English literature exam was Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree. Our English teacher said it was a gentle masterpiece. I hated it – it was all ‘rural’ and about Victorians regretting a lost age. Yet I did quite like the plot line about abolishing the church’s string orchestra. There was a plan to replace it with a mechanical organ. I’d never heard of a church orchestra and I’d certainly never seen one. I played in the Merthyr Borough youth orchestra at the time, though, so I felt some sympathy about losing a music group.
It was in that English class that one of my friends said there was an orchestra in her own chapel in Treharris, where I lived too, and it had had one for longer than anyone could remember. She played in it. Then one summer she asked if I’d go along one Sunday instead of her, as she was going on holiday. I was used to chapels and curious, so I said yes, though all I knew of it was that this chapel had had a minister referred to locally as ‘Thomas Tab’ and that the building was one of two chapels facing each other on Perrott Street, each side of the main street just below ‘The Square’, which was the hub of Treharris town.
The language of the chapel was Welsh. I had no idea when I turned up at Tabernacle Chapel that for them this was the tail end of a very lively orchestral tradition indeed. It was more than half a century later that I came across the photograph on the Internet headed Tabernacle Orchestral Society, Treharris: winners orchestral competition, Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales, Barry, 1920. It showed just two female players among over thirty musicians, with an age range from schoolboys to the very mature.
The chapel, built in 1883, was bigger than my own, which was two years older and far from small itself. Tabernacle had hosted great congregations in the 1905 religious revival. It was rich in panelled pews, balustrade, mouldings and an impressive pulpit front (the building would be Grade 2 listed in due course). The part of the chapel I remember best, though, from the two occasions (I think) when I joined the string players, was the spot on the balcony from which the music came.
There were just a few players accompanying hymns. I was on the ’cello. The galleries raked steeply and the floor felt slightly sloping where we sat, just a few chairs and some music stands. This teenager’s imagination was working overtime in the unfamiliar setting, sitting alongside others who knew all the ropes and knew exactly what they were doing. The whole building was ‘weighty’ and this youngster was nervous. What if the spike of the ’cello slid and slipped into one of those small gaps between floorboards, and got wedged? It would be like some animated cartoon – the player using knees to wrestle with the thing while still keeping the bass part going using both hands. I tried not to move much. It didn’t happen of course.
I knew at the time that I was experiencing something being kept alive by the skin of its teeth. Chapels had organs and probably a piano in the vestry as well. Yet many nonconformists in the 19th century hadn’t been entirely at ease as organs and harmoniums were being installed. It had seemed ‘popish’ to some. Tabernacle, in decades past, had encouraged and built an orchestral fellowship that went beyond anything needed to accompany hymns and now it didn’t want even that to be ended.
Nowadays instrumental ensembles are common in churches and chapels again – a fiddle, a flute and piano/keyboard perhaps, in a modern ‘worship group’, or some people looking like a rock group in another. Some very successful churches have much more variety than this, to take account of all tastes at different services. So the tradition’s far from dead. You could say it’s been resurrected.
