(b c1630; d London, 1708). Organ builder and organist, active in England. His birthplace is unknown, though he is first heard of as ‘Baerent Smitt’, coming from Bremen in 1657 to Hoorn in the Netherlands. In 1660 ‘Baerent Smit, organist’ requested a fee for repairs to the organ in Hoorn Parish Church, and in 1662 he contracted to build two organs, for the Grote Kerk and the Cleinjne Kerk in Edam.
‘Bernard Smith’ is first noted in England in the Westminster Abbey treasurer’s accounts of 1667, where he was paid for tuning the organs. The following year he was paid ‘for the repayre of the old organ and a new chayre organ’ at Rochester Cathedral. The first documented new organ in England by Smith was that for the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford (1670–71). It had the following specification:..\Frames/F922499.html By 1671 Smith was described as ‘the King’s organ maker’, and in 1673 he built a new organ for the King’s private chapel at Windsor. He built a new organ for St Margaret’s, Westminster (1675–6), and in April 1676 was appointed organist there, at a yearly salary of £20. The connection between ‘Baerent Smit’ and ‘Bernard Smith’ is clear not just from the chronology from 1662 to 1687, but also from his signatures and pipemarks at Edam and in England. The similarity of style and detail between the Rückpositiv case at the Grote Kerk, Edam, and that of the organ at the King’s private chapel, Windsor (the prospect of which is at Walton-on-Thames), is clear. In addition, the stop names of the Edam organ correspond to those on instruments by Smith in England, for example, the organs at Durham and Canterbury Cathedrals, and the Temple Church, London. It has traditionally been said that premiums were offered to Smith and other craftsmen to induce them to come to England at the Restoration in 1660. However, 1667 was the most likely year for Smith to have made the journey: the court was re-established, the Trade Wars with the Netherlands had ceased, the Plague was over and London had been almost destroyed by the Great Fire, which provided many new opportunities for work.
Smith was confirmed as the King’s organ maker in 1681, and made keeper of the King’s organs in 1695; he built organs at Windsor and Whitehall. His foreman was a German named Shrider, who married his daughter; he also employed two nephews, Gerard and Christian, who were his assistants until they left to start their own workshops in 1689 and 1690 respectively. In 1691 Gerard Smith built a new Great Organ in a Harris-style case for Ely Cathedral; he also produced organs for St Edmund’s, Sedgefield, and St George’s, Hanover Square (1708 and 1725 respectively; parts of each survive). Christian Smith built an organ for St George’s, Tiverton, in 1696, parts of which survive, and one for St Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey, in 1698, which was replaced in 1750 by Shrider. The craftsmanship of Gerard and Christian does not appear to have equalled that of Bernard. When Christopher Shrider took over Bernard Smith’s business and succeeded him as organ maker to the royal family he completed and installed a number of Smith’s instruments, making it difficult to distinguish fully the achievements of the two men. For example, the organ at St Mary the Virgin, Finedon, Northamptonshire (c1717) has been attributed to Shrider but the case and other details suggest the work of Bernard Smith. Several chamber organs of 17th-century provenance have been ascribed to Smith although contemporary corroborative evidence is lacking, beyond an inscription, possibly in Smith’s hand, in the organ from Brickhill House, Northiam (now in the Royal College of Music, London) which states ‘1702’, jane Frewin, her organ’.
Smith, who was a Protestant, was much in competition with Renatus Harris, who was a Roman Catholic; their rivalry was seen at its most acrimonious in the ‘Battle of the Organs’, a dispute which began in 1682 when the benchers of the Temple consulted Smith about a new organ for their church, and were later persuaded by some of their number to consider Harris. Each builder set up an organ to demonstrate its quality; in the ensuing contest it is said that some of Harris’s friends even cut the bellows of Smith’s organ. In 1688 the matter was decided in favour of Smith. (For a stoplist see Organ, §V, 8, table 17.)
Significant organs by Smith include those at Christ Church, Oxford (1680–?1685), Temple Church, London (1682–8), Durham Cathedral (1684), St Clement Dane’s, London (1689–?1690), St Paul’s Cathedral (1696–7), St Mary the Great, Cambridge (1698), the chapel at the Banqueting House (1699), Eton College Chapel (1700–01) and Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge (1708; fig.2). A relatively unaltered chamber organ survives, in the possession of Noel Mander, but otherwise none of Smith’s work remains in complete condition. There is casework at Christ Church, Durham, St Paul’s, St Mary the Great and Trinity, and pipes at St Paul’s, Trinity and St Mary the Great; the latter has perhaps the largest amount of surviving pipework, though this has been much moved and altered. No playing action from any of his large instruments survives. The disposition of Smith’s organs derives from 17th-century practice in the northern Netherlands and Friesland: Hauptwerk and Rückpositiv, Hauptwerk and Brustwerk, and Hauptwerk and Hinterwerk, paralleled by Smith in his use of Great and Chayre, Great and Eccho, and Great and Choir. The most common organs in north-west Europe were single-manual instruments of five to ten stops, and were similar in size to most of Smith’s output in England. Smith’s organs were noted, as were German and Dutch instruments, for their sweetness and brilliance in the period before the development of the more powerful Schnitger-style organ. Their compass was usually G' to d''', including a short bass octave, although that of the organ in Durham Cathedral was F' to c'''. Smith’s awareness of the problems of unequal temperament is seen in his use of divided sharps in the Durham and Temple organs. This also confirms his links with north-west Europe, where divided sharps had been used by Fritzsche and Germer; but in keeping with the English practice, Smith did not employ pedals. A typical specification for a large organ was that for Durham Cathedral:..\Frames/F922500.htmlThe specification of the St Paul’s organ was similar, with the addition of a Quintadena, Twelfth and Cimball (but no Two & Twenty) on the Chair, plus an Echo organ of Stopped Diapason, Principal, Nason, Fifteenth, Cornet and Trumpet. The organs were winded by wedge bellows, at St Paul’s each 8' by 4'. Smith’s scaling appears to have been based around a diameter of 138 mm for C of the Open Diapason, halving around the 17th and with a quartermouth width and quarter cut-up. Possibly the best indication of the sound of a Smith organ is given by the restored Diapasons on the instrument at Trinity College, which was rebuilt by Metzler in 1976. There is no indication, however, as to how a complete chorus might have sounded, as Smith’s use of Mixtures remains unclear. Instruments had three or four tower cases, with or without a Chayre case, the four-tower format possibly resulting from the need to find space on the main case prospect for the long pipes of the low G'. The surviving pipes and case at Trinity College remain as testimony to the quality of the work of ‘Mr. Bernard Smith, of London, one of His Majesty’s servants and chief of all that this nation has known in the art of making organs’.
BurneyH; HawkinsH; Hopkinson-RimbaultO
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J. Boeringer: ‘Bernard Smith: a Tentative New Chronology’, Organ Yearbook, vi (1975), 4–16
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J. Rowntree: ‘Bernard Smith (c1629–1708), Organist and Organbuilder: his Origins’, JBIOS, ii (1978), 10–23
N. Thistlewaite: ‘Organ-Pneumatico: the Construction and Design of Bernard Smith’s Organ for the University Church, Cambridge, 1698’, JBIOS, ii (1978), 31
J. Rowntree: ‘Bernard Smith: Organist and Organbuilder’, MT, cxx (1979), 764–6
S. Bicknell: ‘Quarter Notes (Durham Cathedral Organ)’, British Institute of Organ Studies Reporter, vi (1982), 7
S. Bicknell: The History of the English Organ (Cambridge, 1996)
D. Knight: ‘The Battle of the Organs: the Smith organ at the Temple and its Organist’, JBIOS, xxi (1997), 76–99
JOHN ROWNTREE