Love at first sight is how Adrian Ridgeway describes his lifelong relationship with church organs.

Mr. Ridgeway runs Bermuda's only organ maintenance and repair company, Bermuda Pipe Organ Services Ltd.

His motto is "if it plays music we can fix it".

"I was shipped off to boarding school when I was eight years old," said Mr. Ridgeway. "I was lucky enough to go to a very small preparatory school with a chapel organ. I had very little interest in music until this point.

"When I saw the organ, it was love at first sight. I used to get out of the dormitories at 2 a.m. to play on the organ. I would be hauled out by the master."

The Royal Gazette recently met up with Mr. Ridgeway at St. John's Church in Pembroke where he has been doing organ cleaning, repair and digital improvement.

He spoke of the difficulties of keeping a highly specialised business going when many Bermudian churches continue to patronise foreign organ repair companies.

"In some cases I have trouble convincing Bermuda that a Bermudian can do the work and in other cases, no," said Mr. Ridgeway. "At St. Paul's, Paget, we were able to do this work, and at St. Theresa's Cathedral in Hamilton, Bishop Robert J. Kurtz was wonderful to work with and incredibly supportive.

"We don't make any money doing this. This is a heartfelt work."

Back in the early 1980s, Mr. Ridgeway did an organ building apprenticeship at J.W. Walker & Sons Ltd. in London and later was a technician for the Copeman Hart Organ Co. Today his company are agents for Rodgers Digital, combination and pipe organs in Bermuda.

He is also an accomplished organist and is a graduate of London's Royal College of Music in organ performance, and is an associate of London's Royal Academy of Music in organ teaching.

His company was involved in the installation of the organ at St. John's Church 20 years ago. During the warranty period, his company was the only one allowed to touch it.

Now his company is working on the St. John's organs again with a complete restoration of the console with new computer equipment from Musicom Ltd., cleaning the chancel organ and adding digital stops which will furnish the choir and solo divisions.

"The St. John's organ is a very versatile instrument," said Mr. Ridgeway. "It is basically a romantic style instrument but with a distinct French colouring. The swell organ is more English in character. So it is a stylistic blend and suits the purpose admirably. It is a wonderful instrument."

At St. John's near the altar, the front of the instrument is a series of large decoratively painted pipes. These no longer speak, and the working pipes are behind it.

"That facade is part of the old organ," said Mr. Ridgeway. "They don't speak. They would have probably be used in the 1890s. When I was a child and I came up here to practise, they spoke."

Although the organ still uses real pipes it has been digitised. Unfortunately, attaching a computer to a pipe organ brings with it new vulnerabilities.

"Last summer there was an enormous lightning strike," said Mr. Ridgeway. "It completely destroyed the computerised transmission system.

"So we are dealing with the rebuilding and replacement of the transmission system."

Unfortunately, the week of the lightning strike there was a wedding planned for St. John's.

"What we did was bring over the old St. Mark's console. When we restored the organ there we took out the old console and replaced it with the old St. John's one."

So the old St. Mark's console has been St. John's temporary console every since.

"They were never without the organ," said Mr. Ridgeway. "The temporary console doesn't control the whole organ, but it controls as much as we could.

"The transmission is a bit like an old telephone exchange. It connects the player with the keys and the stops information. It outputs that information and sends it through parallel cables to the instrument.

"This is an older style transmission which is very flexible. We are very proud of that. We know no foreign builder could ever offer that kind of service to someone in Bermuda. We keep this kind of stuff in our shop for just this particular sort of eventuality. We have quantities of materials both new and old."

Repairs to the damaged transmission was covered by insurance, but in the meantime St. John's decided to undergo further cleaning and restoration of the organ.

One of Mr. Ridgeway's tasks at St. John's is to clean 1,200 of the 2,400 pipes there. The reed pipes are being sent to Pennsylvania for ultrasonic cleaning.

Mr. Ridgeway said one of his most challenging assignments was to install a new organ for St. Theresa's Cathedral a few years ago.

"We were asked to install the new organ in the choir loft.

"Because the choir loft is used by the Mount Saint Agnes Academy choir, with 80 people, space was limited.

"Nothing could stand on the floor. Nothing could obscure the windows, and nothing could obscure a mural on the back wall. The only thing that could go on the floor was the old console."

His company decided to build the organ upside down with the instrument suspended. The blowing plant – like a giant bellows – was put into the church roof, with the wind distributed down. "I am very proud of this because it is our most complicated installation from an engineering perspective," he said. "We worked with OBM architects on it and we worked with D&J Construction on the heavier support elements. Two big support steel beams weighing a ton had to be installed in the roof."

During his early career in Bermuda he was actually head of music at Mount Saint Agnes Academy (MSA) for several years.

"Every MSA graduation and mass I had to play the dreadful old organ that was there before," he said.

After leaving MSA he worked in the hotel industry as a jazz pianist for 12 years.

He decided to start the organ maintenance company in 1989.

"The phone calls started coming in in 1986," he said. "Adrian can you fix this, can you tune this? So one thing led to another. St. Paul's was our first project as was St. Mark's in Smith's Parish which has been an ongoing process there."

He is particularly proud of his work at St. Paul's, because the church has Bermuda's largest pipe organ with 5,400 pipes, seven divisions and eight ranks.

"It is quite a large organ for such a small church," said Mr. Ridgeway. "Organs with 5,500 pipes are rare, in fact this instrument would easily rank amongst some of the largest in the world, probably in about position 126-130, based on a web site dedicated to such statistics."

The largest pipe organ is located in the Convention Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey with 33,112 pipes, although much of it is not playable anymore, according to Mr. Ridgeway.

"All I've ever wanted is for our work to speak for itself," he said. "If anyone from any church wants to come and see what I do, or play one of the organs I have worked on, I am delighted to accommodate."