MacDonald Hall, Baillie Henderson Hospital, Toowoomba
[Photograph by Howard Baker (1990s)]
MacDonald Hall, Baillie Henderson Hospital, Toowoomba
[Photograph by Howard Baker (1990s)]
Historical and Technical Documentation by Geoffrey Cox
© OHTA 2011 (last updated August 2011)
The Baillie Henderson Hospital was opened in 1890 as the Toowoomba Lunatic Asylum, and has been known by its present name since 1968. The institution as a whole is notable for its symmetrical layout, designed by the colonial architect, J.J. Clark. The first phase of construction took place between 1886 and 1910. MacDonald Hall was designed as a recreation hall and constructed in 1888. It was modified in 1913, when the walls were increased in height with the addition of high-level sash windows.1
The organ at Baillie Henderson Hospital, Toowoomba
[Photographs by Howard Baker (1990s)]
The organ in MacDonald Hall was built in 1968 by Walter Emerson of Toowoomba, with assistance by psychiatric patients of the hospital as a project in occupational therapy.2 Emerson, the Toowoomba organist and amateur organ builder who died in 1986, built several organs in the Toowoomba region. The first was a practice organ he built for his own home, now at St Paul's Anglican Church, Stanthorpe, and this was the second.
The organ at Baillie Henderson is located on two cantilevered platforms on either side of the hall, as well as above the pressed metal proscenium of the stage. The metal pipework includes four ranks of old English spotted-metal pipes of undisclosed origin (*asterisked below). The remaining metal pipework was imported from Germany, and all of the wooden pipes were made in Toowoomba.3 The two 58-note keyboards came from the Norman & Beard organ at St Luke's Anglican Church, Toowoomba,4 which had been rebuilt with a new console by H.W. Jarrott in 1960.
Console of the Emerson organ
[Photograph by Howard Baker (1990s)]
| GREAT Open Diapason Gedackt Principal Fifteenth Mixture SWELL Holzflote Gamba Gemshorn Waldflote Oboe PEDAL Bourdon Bass Flote Quinte Piffaro [4ft & 2ft] COUPLERS Swell to Pedal Great to Pedal Swell to Great Swell Super to Great Swell Sub to Great Swell Super |
8 8 4 2 III 8 8 4 2 8 16 8 5-1/3 II |
* * * ** ** ** * A A A |
Swell tremulant
Detached stop-key console
Balanced swell pedal
Electro-pneumatic action
Compass: 58/30.5
* old English spotted metal pipework.
** imported German metal pipework.
The Visitor's Book at the hospital records that John Birch, then Organist and Master of the Choristers at Chichester Cathedral in England, visited Toowoomba and played the organ in 1969, leaving the following remarks:
I would not have believed such an endeavour as this could have been possible to achieve. That it has been done, and to such a degree of excellence, is a masterly achievement, and I can only hope that those who built it gained as much enjoyment and musical pleasure from the experience as I did from playing it.6
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1 Queensland Heritage Council, Queensland Heritage Register, location 601161.
2 Date and details supplied by Walter Emerson, February 1974; Organ Music Society Newsletter (Adelaide, June 1969), p. 10.
3 Personal communication to G. Cox from Walter Emerson, February 1974.
4 Personal communication to Phillip Gearing from Leslie W. Rub, May 2003.
5 Specification noted by G. Cox, February 1974; compass supplied by Phillip Gearing and Leslie W. Rub, 2003.
6 Visitor's Book at Baillie Henderson Hospital, 26 August 1969.