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photo: Trevor Bunning (2018)

As Old South Head Road dips down towards the little village of Watsons Bay, between the road and the cliff-face, and not far from the Gap, stands St Peter’s Anglican Church.  It is a small church, built in the mid-nineteenth century of honey-coloured sandstone in the Gothic style, and capped with a shingle roof. It looks out to sea on one side and on the other has magnificent views up the harbour.

Inside, the little chapel is simple but elegant with a timber-framed roof supported on arched timber trusses. But it is the organ gallery at the end of the church that is most intriguing. There, sitting above the church entrance and accessible by a spiral staircase, is installed the oldest pipe organ in Australia1 and one with a fascinating history, even if some aspects are contested.

The baroque organ was built for the lawyer and English Tory member of parliament, Spencer Perceval, by the respected firm of Robert & William Gray. The Hon. Spencer Perceval had a distinguished political career, serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer and from 1807 to 1812 as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He became the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated when, as he was leaving the chamber of the House of Commons, he was shot by a man with a grievance against the government2. After his death his widow sold the organ to a church in Somerset. After World War 1 it was bought by a Sydney doctor, shipped to Australia, and installed in the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. It was later sold to St Gabriel’s Anglican Girls School at Waverley and in the 1940s it passed to St Peters Church where it was dedicated as a memorial to fallen soldiers3.

Those are the established facts. From here it becomes murkier, but much more interesting. In the 1930s a number of newspapers and journals carried articles that drew a connection between the St Peters organ and Napoleon Bonaparte. It was said that Spencer Perceval had “lent (the organ) to the Emperor Napoleon with whom he was on friendly terms.”4 The Sydney Morning Herald  reported in August 1939 that the organ then “stood in the Tuileries” where, Walkabout Magazine (1.10 1941) tells us, “Napoleon is said to have spent  many happy hours playing on (it).” After Waterloo in 1815 the organ, at the insistence of Lady Perceval it is said, was returned to England where she had it sold5. Since then it seems to have been accepted by everyone from the NSW Department of Environment and Heritage to Woollahra Council and St Peters Church itself that at some stage Napoleon had the St Peters organ in his custody.

What are we to make of this curious tale? Spencer Perceval took possession of the organ in 1796, the year he first entered Parliament, and the same year in which Napoleon was engaged in his first Italian campaign. There is nothing in any biography of Perceval that I could find that would indicate that he ever visited France where he might have met Napoleon and formed a friendship, a friendship so close as it would lead him to lend a valuable organ so soon after buying it. As for that “friendship” with Napoleon, Perceval once identified Napoleon as the woman in Revelation 17: 3-6 ‘who (sits) upon a… beast … the mother of harlots … drunken with the blood of the saints’. 6 In any case, in less than three years England and France were at war, and remained so even past Perceval’s assassination, so there was little opportunity or likelihood of a transfer of a pipe organ across the channel.

And what about the vision of Napoleon merrily belting out organ music in the Tuileries? Again, Napoleon did not appear to have any musical talent nor did he play a musical instrument.7 His generals and aides, and even his young English friend on St Helena, Betsy Balcombe*, testified that he had a dreadful singing voice that was chronically out of tune. He did appreciate music, however, if it was used to further patriotic or political ends, but especially if it was associated with a pretty face.

During his Italian campaign in 1800 Napoleon saw the beautiful Italian soprano Guesseppina Grassini perform at La Scala in Milan and was smitten. He almost immediately took her as his mistress and within a month he had brought her to Paris, installed her in a house and provided her with an income.8 Whether this arrangement included Madame Grassini performing in the Tuileries with or without Napoleon accompanying on the organ, is unknown.

As a twist to this romance, after Napoleon had been exiled to Elba, his nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, serving as the British Ambassador to France, also took Madame Grassini as his mistress, a relationship that lasted even after Welllington was called to the battlefield at Waterloo.9

So where does that leave us with the Napoleon-St Peters organ connection? On the face of it, it has all the appearance of an urban myth, for although there is no doubting the organ’s association with Spencer Perceval, which is well documented, there is nothing concrete that supports the Bonaparte connection and, indeed circumstantially, it would appear such a link to be unlikely. Supportive evidence may appear in the future, but, for the moment, we should be satisfied with the organ’s interesting connection with the only assassinated British Prime Minister.

But whatever its provenance, the little organ continues to attach itself tangentially to history. The Australian equivalent of Chancellor of the Exchequer is Treasurer. In a case of history rhyming, when the young lawyer and future Treasurer and Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, married Janette Parker at St Peter’s in 1971, it was fitting that Spencer Perceval’s organ should sound the Wedding March for them, although the young couple may have been unaware of the connection nor what it bode for their future which, thankfully, didn’t include an assassination.

*

*Besides the organ at St Peter’s, there is another musical Napoleonic link to Sydney. In exile on St Helena, Naopleon befriended the family of the garrison’s providor, William Balcombe, and in particular his young daughter, 13-year-old Betsy, with whom the Emperor formed a strong friendship. Betsy was musical (in adult life she taught music) and, according to her memoirs, “The first question he asked (me) was ‘I suppose you’re too young to play music.’ and I said ‘no, no, no I play and I sing.’”

On St Helena, Napoleon had been sent a guitar by his sister. We shouldn’t assume from this that Napoleon himself played the guitar: after all, he was also given Sèvres china, but wasn’t expected to cook for himself. It seems that Napoleon gave the guitar, made by the Parisian luthier, Pierre Flambeau, to his young friend, for it was with her when her family arrived in Sydney, her father having taken a government position in the colony after leaving St Helena. It was passed down through the family until it ended up with the wealthy Melbourne society matron, Dame Mabel Brooks, who gifted it back to the French nation.10

– PW Donnelly
   January 2021

  1.  St Peter’ Anglican Church Watsons Bay, Documentation of pipe organ built by R and W Gray 1796, John Stiller, NSW Heritage Office
  2. Spencer Perceval: the Evangelical Prime Minister, 1762-1812, Gray, Denis, 1963
  3. stpeterswb.org.au
  4. Liverpool News 16.9. 1937
  5. stpeterswb.org.au
  6. PJ. Jupp, British Empire.com
  7. Prod’homme & Martens Napoleon, Music and Musicians, The Musical Quarterly 1927
  8. Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte in shannonselin.com
  9. Felice Blangini, Souvenirs de F. Blangini , quoted in shannonselin.com
  10. Sydney Morning Herald, August 2, 2019; Tom Keneally, the Australian, December 12, 2015