Keith Watts first climbed into the organ gallery at Lydlinch as a 15-year-old. Seventy-three years, thousands of hymns and one century-old organ later, he is still there
All images Ed Baker
When Keith Watts first began playing the organ at St Thomas à Becket Church in Lydlinch, he was 15 years old. There was a choir alongside him in the gallery, four services every month and, at Christmas and Harvest Festival, barely room to squeeze another person into the church. That was 73 years ago.
Keith is now 88. The choir has gone, congregations are small and church organists themselves have become increasingly scarce. But up in the gallery at Lydlinch, Keith is still playing.
Apart from two years away on National Service and one particularly important Sunday – his own wedding day – he has accompanied almost every service there since the early 1950s. ‘I’ll keep playing until I can’t do it any more or someone tells me to stop,’ he says. There seems little immediate danger of either.
Even operations on both shoulders managed to only keep him away for a couple of weeks. During the Covid pandemic, when gathering inside the church was impossible, Keith found a portable organ and played outside instead. Over seven decades he is thought to have accompanied almost 15,000 hymns, alongside countless weddings and funerals.
And throughout it all, remarkably, the instrument beneath his hands has remained the same.
The reed organ at St Thomas à Becket was installed in 1924, replacing an earlier harmonium. In its earliest days there was no electricity to power it, and someone had to pump the organ while another person played.
A century later, Keith knows its strengths and foibles rather well. ‘It is a good organ for what it is, especially now it’s more than 100 years old,’ he says. ‘I find that the louder you play, the better the folk sing but I do like a bit of light and shade.’
He has favourites, naturally: ‘There are some hymns I’m not so keen on, ones that are a bit fiddly. But I like Love Divine – we had that at our wedding – and Judge Eternal. Some harmonies are my own, not what’s in the book.’
Music from the beginning
Keith’s musical life began long before Lydlinch church entrusted him with its organ. At nine, he would cycle to Henstridge for lessons. By 15 he was considered sufficiently accomplished to take over at St Thomas à Becket.
‘Ever since I was small I always loved music,’ he says.
And it wasn’t just church music. As a young man he played accordion in a dance band and also took up the saxophone.
‘But there aren’t any dance bands any more,’ he observes. Today he still plays the piano every day. He has also been a bellringer – including at Lydlinch – although the church’s bells are currently silent while funds are raised for extensive repairs. The bells have their own place in Dorset history. Lydlinch was one of the churches immortalised by Dorset dialect poet William Barnes, whose poem The Bells of Lydlinch captured their sound across the countryside.
The village church itself is considerably older still. A church has stood on the site since the 12th century, while much of the current building dates from the 15th and 16th centuries.
For most of Keith’s lifetime, though, it has simply been part of the weekly rhythm of ordinary village life.
‘When I started there was a choir in the gallery where the organ is and we had four services a month,’ he remembers. ‘At Harvest Festival and Christmas it was standing room only.
‘We’re down to three services a month now, but we get 20 or 25 people attending, and there are still weddings and funerals.
‘There used to be other organists who played locally but there are very few now, and no youngsters are coming through. They just don’t want to do it.’
More than the organist
Calling Keith ‘the church organist’ understates his contribution considerably.
Any fees he receives for playing are handed straight back.
By trade he was a carpenter and joiner, although those who know his work describe him as a master craftsman.
Over the years he has made tables, collection boxes and picture frames for the church, as well as carrying out innumerable repairs.
His working life was apparently not without incident.
‘I have been lucky,’ he says, in a broad Wessex burr. ‘I have fallen off a number of roofs over the years and I even fractured my back once.’
Neither that nor advancing age appears to have done much to interrupt the weekly routine.
The church is currently nearing the end of a £120,000 fundraising effort for repairs to its bells. Once that work is complete, attention will turn to improving Keith’s 1924 organ.
There is poignancy behind his remarkable anniversary.
Keith’s wife Pam, who served as churchwarden at St Thomas à Becket, died earlier this year. They had been married for 65 years. It was at Lydlinch church that they had first met, and it was there that they married – accounting for one of the extremely rare occasions on which Keith was missing from the organ stool.
Love Divine was among their wedding hymns, and it remains one of his favourites.
Pretty much every service
Keith is now believed to be Britain’s longest continually-serving church organist.
The previous holder of the distinction, Joycelyn Hocking of St Neot in Cornwall, began playing as a seven-year-old in 1938 and was recognised after more than 80 years’ service before retiring.
The Telegraph recently reported that Keith is now believed to have inherited the distinction.
Keith himself seems rather less interested in records than in simply carrying on.
‘Apart from my National Service and my wedding day, I’ve played here pretty much every service,’ he says.
Seventy-three years after the teenage boy first took his place beside the choir in the gallery, the congregation may be smaller and the organ a little more elderly. But Keith Watts is still there.
And next Sunday, assuming nobody tells him otherwise, he will be playing again.
