Dunbar Methodist Church

I have been taking the primary school kids to visit Dunbar Methodist Church. It's the oldest Methodist Church in Scotland and Wesley himself preached there 21 times. It's a facinating building that keeps revealing its secrets. One of them is behind the organ. In the days of old the organ was hand pumped by a wee laddie stuck in a secret room...well box next to the organ. If you look into this dark space now you can see that the wee laddie obviously got bored in the services and had a turn at graffitti. You can see his name and various dates etched onto the wall if you shine a torch in there or take a digital photo as I did. The writing in the photo is in complete darkness. I hope that was of interest to any Methodist historians. Its well worth a vist and Betty and David are great hosts. See

The visit got me thinking back to my experiences of church organs. In the 1980's when we were being subjected to GrahamKendricks soul raising hits like 'Shine Jesus Shine' and 'Make Way Make Way', and the organ was seen by me as obsolete. The guitar and the pan pipes was the new kid on the block. To assist in my theory, me and Smithy decided it would be fun to switch all the pipes around at the back or the organ. It was an innocent act of vandalism but one that would have been amusing to hear. Basically the low keys now played high notes and vice versa. Because some of the organists were so bad it probably took a few months for them to realise what was wrong. After they brought in a specialist to fix it we got our knuckles well and truly rapped. it could have been worse....we had considered putting ping pong balls in the pipes so they would pop out when the organ played.