English family of organ builders.
(1) Thomas Harris [Harriss, Harrisson]
MICHAEL GILLINGHAM/NICHOLAS PLUMLEY/STEPHEN BICKNELL
(d ?London, c1684). He was apprenticed to the elder Thomas Dallam, and left with Dallam’s family for Brittany in 1642. He married Katherine Dallam (daughter of Robert) by whom he had six children, including Renatus. He built three organs while in Brittany, at Roscoff (1649–50), Brélevenez (1654–6) and Morlaix, Notre Dame du Mûr (1656–61), and may have helped his father-in-law on others. He returned to England with his family about 1660, after the Restoration. An agreement he made in 1666 with the Dean and Chapter of Worcester described him as living in New Sarum, where he was engaged on the restoration and installation of the pre-Commonwealth organ in the cathedral. By then he had shortened his name from Harrisson to Harriss. This work was followed in the same year by a new organ for Gloucester Cathedral (embodying the old Chair organ, probably made by Robert Dallam in 1641) and by a new organ for Chichester Cathedral (1677–8). He built instruments for All Hallows, Barking-by-the-Tower, London (1675–7), St Sepulchre without Newgate, London (1676), and Winchester College (1664), and the organ at St Nicholas (now the cathedral), Newcastle (1676), is attributed to him. He was possibly assisted by his son Renatus in the later works. Little survives of his pipework except at Gloucester and Chichester, though the cases remain at Gloucester, St Sepulchre and Newcastle. His reputation is overshadowed by that of his more famous son (2) Renatus Harris who described him in his letter of 30 August 1683 to the Dean and Chapter of Durham as his ‘poore aged father’; by then Renatus seems to have taken over the business.
(b ?Quimper, c1652; d Bristol or London, 1724). Son of (1) Thomas Harris. His approximate date of birth derives from a lawsuit of 1703 in which he was said to be about 51 years old. He went to England with his father after the Restoration and gradually took over the business in the years preceding his father's death. In 1677 he married Joan Hiett, by whom he had a son, (3) John Harris, and a daughter who married the organ builder John Byfield (i). He was a Roman Catholic and enjoyed the support of Catherine of Braganza; he built an organ for the Popish Chapel at Whitehall Palace in 1686–8. G.B. Draghi, the queen's organist, demonstrated the instrument Harris built for the Temple Church in the conflict with ‘Father’ Smith which started in 1683. Towards the end of his life he moved to Bristol.
Renatus Harris was the most flamboyant English organ builder of his time – not above sharp practice to gain advantage over his hated rival, Smith, in the famous ‘battle of the organs’ contest in the Temple Church (he is alleged to have sabotaged Smith's bellows, but lost the contract), or to procure more work for himself. He fell foul of several city vestries and in particular of the Governors of Christ's Hospital, Horsham, who must have considered themselves well rid of him in 1711 (he put their organ out of order as money was owed to him, and was even alleged to have stolen 23 pipes). He had a flair for publicity, and never shrank from the opportunity to recommend himself for work, as for example to the Dean and Chapter at Durham in 1683. In 1698 he advertised himself in the Post Boy as being able to divide a note into 100 parts, and he invited ‘all Masters and others of curious and Nice Ears’ to visit his house in Wyne Office Court, Fleet Street, to witness his demonstration of such a feat. A sore point with Harris had been the choice of his rival to build the St Paul's Cathedral organ (finished in 1697), and in about 1712 he produced a pamphlet describing an organ he wished to build at the west end of the cathedral: it would comprise ‘six entire sets of keys for the hands, besides pedals for the feet’, and the sixth manual was ‘to be adapted for the emitting of sounds to express passion by swelling any note, as if inspired by human breath; which is the greatest improvement an organ is capable of except it had articulation’. At Salisbury Cathedral he built a four-manual organ, borrowing 14 stops of the Great organ ‘by communication’ as a second Great, as well as providing a Chair organ of eight stops and an Echo of 11. There was full mutation work on both the Great and Echo organs, and eight reeds. He had an engraving published, with a flattering description of the organ's merits, which can claim to be the earliest picture of an English organ case in its own right.
Harris settled into a mature style apparently much influenced by French practice. This may have been as much the result of his court connections as of his upbringing, for he was only eight years old when the family returned to England. He handed down to John Harris and John Byfield (i), who succeeded him in the business, a tradition of reed voicing in the French manner which was noted even by 19th-century writers on the organ. His action work was generally considered superior to Smith's, and the judgment of history may well be that he was the better builder.
Harris made about 30 new organs after 1684, over half of them for London churches, and rebuilt or extensively repaired some 30 others. 12 of his cases survive, and ten organs contain pipework by him. Organs and cases which are typical of his work may be seen at St Andrew Undershaft, London (1696; the case and some pipework survive); Bristol Cathedral (1685; the main case, divided so that the original east and west fronts now stand side by side, survives, as does some pipework); All Hallows, Twickenham (formerly All Hallows, Lombard Street, 1700; a case and some pipework survive); and St James's, Piccadilly, London (1686–8; Great case from the Popish Chapel, Whitehall, carved by Grinling Gibbons and with fine figure sculpture). Other organs were built for St Lawrence Jewry (1684–5); St Michael Cornhill (1684 and 1704); Temple Church (1684); Hereford Cathedral (1686); King's College, Cambridge (1686); Jesus College, Cambridge (1688); Christ Church, Newgate Street (1690); St Bride's, Fleet Street (1694); Winchester Cathedral (1694); St Clement Eastcheap (1696); St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin (1696–7); Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (1697); St Andrew's, Holborn (1700); Bedford Road Chapel (1700); St Mary, Lambeth (1701); St Giles Cripplegate (1705); St Peter Mancroft, Norwich (1707); Salisbury Cathedral (1710); Cork Cathedral (1710); St James's, Bristol (1718–19); and St Dionis Backchurch (1722–4, completed by his son (3) John Harris).
(b ?London, probably after 1677; d ?London,1743). Son of (2) Renatus Harris. He seems to have worked for his father in London after about 1715, and later apparently settled in Bristol. He took out letters of administration to his father's estate in 1725 in partnership with his brother-in-law John Byfield (i), with whom in 1726 he built an important organ for St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. The builders gave an account of this instrument, with an engraving of the case and gallery, in an advertisement published in 1728–9, by which date they were in Red Lion Street, Holborn, London. The organ had three manuals, ‘Pedals to the lower Octave of this great Organ’ and ‘1928 valuable speaking pipes, which are considerably more than either the organ in St Paul's Cathedral or that in St Martin's Church in London’. The Great organ had 63 keys, complete from C'; there was a coupler (the first recorded in England); and of the 26 speaking stops, eight were reeds, including a Bassoon, a ‘Vox Humane’ and a ‘Cromhorn’.
Fine instruments built by the partnership were those of St George's, Doncaster (1740), and St Mary's, Shrewsbury (1729, the case and a few pipes remain). The organ now at St Vedast-alias-Foster, London, was built by them for St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange in 1732 (it retains its case and some original pipework). Other organs by Harris and Byfield were made for St Alban Wood Street, London (1728–9); destroyed in World War II), St Thomas's, Bristol (1728–9), Grantham parish church (1736), St Mary's, Haverfordwest (1737), St Lawrence, Reading (1741), and the Great Musick Hall, Fishamble Street, Dublin (1742).
After John Harris's death, Byfield and Richard Bridge seem to have inherited his sphere of influence.
Hopkins-RimbaultO
A. Freeman: ‘Renatus Harris’, The Organ, vi (1926–7), 160–70
A. Freeman: ‘John Harris and the Byfields’, The Organ, xxv (1945–6), 112–18, 145–52
A. Freeman: ‘An Organ by Renatus Harris’, The Organ, xxvi (1946–7), 178–9
N.M. Plumley: ‘The Harris-Byfield Connection’, JBIOS, iii (1979), 108–34
M. Cocheril: ‘The Dallams in Brittany’, JBIOS, vi (1982), 63–77
B. Matthews: ‘The Dallams and the Harrises’, JBIOS, viii (1984), 58–68
S. Bicknell: The History of the English Organ (Cambridge, 1996)
N.M. Plumley: The Organs of the City of London (Oxford, 1996)