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PPE

An update on the Guards’ Chapel Organ Appeal, for which His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales is Patron.  We have raised £450,000, with donations from a small number of extremely generous benefactors and this is combined with £400,000 from the Household Division Charity (Registered Charity No 1138248) and all Household Division Regiments, bringing the interim total to £850,000.  This has now been supplemented by a number of legacies left to the Guards’ Chapel Trust (Registered Charity No 238694) and smaller but no less welcome donations from a large number of benefactors.  Along with the proceeds of collections, we have now raised over £970,000.  In order to reach our target of £1.5 million, we are continuing to work with a number of individuals who have pledged varying amounts and we are applying to Foundations, including the Nuffield Trust who are generous supporters of the Armed Forces.

Dr William McVicker, our consultant, said a while back that organs tend not to fail catastrophically and instead said they ‘degrade gracefully’. However, the timeliness of our project was proven in April when the organ failed. Fortunately, Gilkes (our organ repairers) got it going again but this confirmed it is on its last legs; given it was built in 1919, it has not done badly though!  It reinforces the importance of getting on with it and we are now sufficiently confident of reaching our target that we are in the process of inviting tenders from three English organ builders: Mander Organs, Harrison and Harrison, and Nicholson and Co.  The project will be a ‘design and build’ so we will have the ability to scale the organ to fit within the current space and within our eventual budget.  Once we have evaluated the tenders, we estimate that we should be doing the work either in January 2020 or January 2021, depending on the lead time for orders with the selected company.

Anyone who would like to donate to this most important and worthwhile appeal should contact the Treasurer Household Division Funds on treasurer@householddivision.org.uk