CE Ely Cathedral on Armistice Day [L] Wed, November 11th 2020

[DracoM]

Just a bump to remind about the repeat @ 3 p.m. this [Sunday, 15th] afternoon.

[mopsus]

the organ decided to behave itself. It has been distinctly temperamental over the past few weeks and months, despite repeated (expensive) visits from tuners and engineers, largely because of guidelines about keeping the doors open all the time during the day (even in a building which is enormous and notoriously draughty at the best of times).

I sang an extremely chilly October half-term weekend at Ely about 7 years ago. Never again! We learned too late that the heating was only turned on after Remembrance Sunday 'otherwise the heat would escape when the West doors were opened'. Future visits will be at other times of year. I hope for the sake of the choir members that the requirement to ventilate the building is not going to mean no heating at all this winter!

[DracoM]

.........wow! No heating in an ELY winter............phew!

[Finzi4ever]

.........wow! No heating in an ELY winter............phew!

...brings back memories of clustering round the old, coke-fired Gurney stoves...and chilblains: 'luxury!'

[Roger Judd]

Those Gurney stoves, or Queen Victorias as they were sometimes known (fat, round and with a crown on the top!), were totally useless, unless you were virtually on top of them. Why the cathedral wasted money on coke for them I shall never understand. In the organ loft, in the dead of winter, I wore so many clothes that I couldn't reach the Solo manual! Ah ... happy days!
RJ

[ardcarp]

I remember them well in Lichfield Cathedral I gather the late Richard Greening, organist, would occasionally play in those woollen gloves with the finger-ends chopped off.

[mopsus]

Maybe Quilisma could confirm whether Ely is still unheated at the end of October/early November. I'd hate to put off future half-term visitors. And which Cathedrals are particularly well heated? I recall going to Canterbury about 5 years ago and finding heating on at the end of May!

[Miles Coverdale]

Those Gurney stoves, or Queen Victorias as they were sometimes known (fat, round and with a crown on the top!), were totally useless, unless you were virtually on top of them. Why the cathedral wasted money on coke for them I shall never understand. In the organ loft, in the dead of winter, I wore so many clothes that I couldn't reach the Solo manual! Ah ... happy days!
RJ

They weren't entirely useless, in my experience. I remember singing in a concert in Hereford Cathedral in February a number of years ago, when the then chapter clerk was having an economy drive, and the Gurneys had been off for a week or so, and the place was unbelievably cold, so they did take the edge off. In the days when they were coke-fired, the four of them got through a ton a week each, and there was someone whose only job was keeping them topped up. And then you had to deal with all the soot and so on that got into the organ pipes.

[Quilisma]

I'm sorry that Mopsus found our edifice intolerably cold, although I hope her visiting choir experienced at least a warm Ely welcome! I fear, though, that the cliché of our being a borderline uninhabitable outpost, miles from civilisation and populated by dangerous feral folk, goes back to the Norman conquest and the last stand of the Resistance under Hereward the Wake. It was also reinforced by Oxonians traditionally sneering at Cantabrigians on the grounds of allegedly being from "the ghastly wilds of the Fens", and Cantabrigians responding to this themselves by sneering about places "beyond" Cambridge which actually ARE in the Fens, which, of course, Cambridge itself isn't. (And of course Ely is on the Isle of Ely, surrounded by fen but not fen itself...)

For what it's worth, the Gurney stoves (any relation of Ivor?) ARE still in place, and ARE still used, although I'm pretty sure they no longer produce soot! I'm afraid I don't know when the heating typically kicks in, but I do know that at times when the building is fully open to the public there is much more thought for the comfort and wellbeing of our visitors than perhaps there would have been a few decades ago. Under normal circumstances, when it is cold there is an effort to make sure that what heat there is stays in the building. The stories of people shivering during the height of summer simply do not ring true: in fact, in the summer it can become intolerably hot in there, particularly in the Lady Chapel, which is, after all, basically a massive greenhouse. The underfloor heating in there (installed about twenty years ago) doesn't make an enormous amount of difference in the winter, but in the summer it can create the opposite problem, because the thermostat system is somewhat counterintuitive and can't easily be overridden.

But I won't deny that heating is often at a premium. As we went into lockdown in March, and as the impending dire financial situation became apparent, there was an effort to conserve as much energy as possible. So there is currently perhaps more reluctance to put the heating on than there would have been last year. The winter of 2018-2019 was particularly bracing, because overrunning work replacing the South Nave Aisle roof meant that using our favourite Gurney stove (outside the Song School) was prohibited because of exhaust fumes. But that was the exception. Most of the time these days, during the winter the heating is on and draughts are minimised and the ambient temperature is at least tolerable. I have to admit that our cassocks are rather warm, though!

(Another notoriously perishing winter was 2012, when, during a nationwide period of very cold weather, the Christmas tree arrived and was so enormous that it would not go through the door. It then got stuck, so the door was gaping open for absolutely ages during blizzard conditions, or so the legend has it. This was shortly before I arrived!)

The warmest cathedral I have been in was in Kraków Castle. There was snow outside, but inside it was baking, and the heating was literally roaring (as were the floor polishers!). I nearly passed out.