English family of organ builders.
MICHAEL GILLINGHAM/NICHOLAS PLUMLEY
(b ?London, c1694; d Wolverhampton, 1751). He married Renatus Harris’s daughter Catherine, and started in partnership with his brother-in-law John Harris in 1725. He built several important organs with Harris and, after the latter apparently retired in about 1740, he continued on his own, probably assisted by his son. He was highly reputed for his reed voicing (John Stanley said that his reeds in the 1740 Doncaster parish church organ were worth their weight in silver); in this, as in his specifications, he followed the Harris tradition. Together with Harris he built new organs for the City of London churches of St Alban Wood Street (1728–9) and St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange (1732), and added Swell departments to many existing organs, for example at St Mary Abbots, Kensington (1730), Holy Sepulchre without Newgate, London (1739; payments were made to ‘Mr. Byfield and Co.’), the Temple Church (1741) and St Andrew Undershaft, London (1749). He made considerable alterations to the Renatus Harris organ in St Botolph Aldgate (1744), almost certainly adding a new case. The case there, with gabled cornices over the pipe flats, is very similar to others from his workshop, including those at St Lawrence’s, Reading (1741), and St Mary’s, Truro (c1750; now part of the cathedral). His last work was a new organ for Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (1751); he took the old Renatus Harris organ there in part exchange. Byfield died on the return journey to England and his widow sold the instrument to St John’s, Wolverhampton, where it survives (though reconstructed).
(d London, 1767). Son of (1) John Byfield (i). He evidently succeeded to his father’s business in 1751, and like him was a good reed voicer. He almost certainly built an organ for the Music Room of Curzon House, South Audley Street, in about 1760. The case of this organ is now in the parish church of Thorpe Morieux, Suffolk. An excellent example of his work survives at St Mary’s, Rotherhithe, London (1764), where there is a relatively unaltered Great diapason chorus and Trumpet and a very handsome Rococo case. For Grant Castle, Scotland, he made a large chamber organ in 1766; the entire instrument survives, with remarkably little alteration, at Finchcocks, Goudhurst, Kent. It is an organ of exceptional importance as one of the very few from the 18th century in a trustworthy state.
(d ?London, c1799). Son of (2) John Byfield (ii). He was in partnership with Samuel Green, a builder of approximately the same age, in 1768– 72, and was organ builder to the royal household in 1770–82. With Green he built at least ten organs; the case survives of their instrument of 1770 in St Margaret’s, Barking, Essex. At St Mary, Islington, an elaborate four-towered case dating from 1771 by Byfield and Green survived until World War II. Between 1774 and 1780 he seems to have been in loose partnership with England and Russell, working with them at Christ’s Hospital, London, in 1780. He is mentioned in a number of City of London parish records in connection with tuning and repairs to City organs as at St Katharine Cree, St Bride’s, Fleet Street, St Andrew Undershaft and St Edmund the King. In these parish accounts there is mention of a salary for ‘John Byfield and Son’ in 1793. Possibly the last work carried out by John Byfield (iii) was at St Andrew Undershaft in 1799.
(b 1766; d ?1806). Son of (3) John Byfield (iii). He and his father provided an organ for St Bartholomew-the-Less, Smithfield (1794), on an annuity basis, and payments ceased after 1806; the agreement with the parish stated that the 28-year-old Byfield would be paid until his own decease and that of his sister, Mary Frances.
Hopkins-Rimbault
A. Freeman: ‘John Harris and the Byfields’, The Organ, xxv (1945–6), 112–18, 145–52
W.L. Sumner: The Organ: its Evolution, Principles of Construction and Use (London, 1952, enlarged 4/1973/R)
C. Clutton and A. Niland: The British Organ (London, 1963/R, 2/1982)
N.M. Plumley: ‘The Harris-Byfield Connection’, JBIOS, iii (1979), 108–34
N.M. Plumley: The Organs of the City of London (Oxford, 1996)