Herbert John La French Norman, who preferred to be called John, was born in Hornsey, North London, on 15 January 1932. The only child of Herbert and Hilda Norman, he attended Tollington Grammar School in nearby Muswell Hill, moving to Norwich School from 1942-45 to escape the bombing of London. Aged 15, he started learning to play the organ, having to give this up when he went to study at Imperial College, London, where he took a BSc in Physics (specialising in acoustics), met Jill in 1951 and graduated in 1953. Getting married in 1956, the couple first lived in East Barnet and in 1964 moved to a house in Whetstone, where Norman lived for the rest of his life. Jill fell ill in 2001, was looked after at home by Norman for many years, and died in 2018. In 2020 he met Jill Hollywell and they had five happy and fulfilling years together. After enjoying a cruise with Jill, Norman developed pneumonia, dying peacefully in Barnet hospital on 27 January.

John Norman said that his introduction to the organ world had been ‘Cleaning’, what he described as ‘a somewhat doubtful little organ in the Methodist Mission Hall off the Old Kent Road’. This was a holiday job given to him, aged 16, by his father Herbert, managing director of Hill, Norman & Beard. Norman joined the family firm in his twenties, becoming a director in 1960. He travelled extensively around the world for the company, which at the time had subsidiary workshops in Canada and Australia. He had a particular interest in three areas of work. One was the design of new electrical mechanisms of all sorts, principally the firm’s compact electro-magnetic switching and combination relays and the application of pallet magnets. The second was in continuing to develop (with voicer Mark Fairhead) the neo-baroque style of voicing which the firm adopted in rebuilds and new organs from the early 1950s. The third was in designing clever compact organs for churches with modest space or little money, using a limited amount of inter-rank borrowing for bass octaves of 4ft and 2ft stops. These organs, and the Pedal additions in the company’s rebuilds, used Norman’s design of direct-electric chests with large cardboard tube expansion chambers. The climax of his inventiveness was the unique electro-magnetic action for the 1971 Gloucester Cathedral organ, the year in which he replaced his father as managing director. In addition to the Gloucester organ and a sizeable clutch of new small instruments, Norman would have considered as his most significant projects the rebuilds in St Mary-at-Hill, Bath Abbey, Lichfield Cathedral and St Mary Stafford.

Things were not easy for HN&B in the early 1970s so in 1974 John resigned. He joined IBM, remaining with them until his retirement in the late 1980s. He was responsible for the IBM customer magazine and selling large computers to corporate organisations. While at IBM, his friend Michael Gillingham suggested that he assist the London Diocesan Advisory Committee for the Care of Churches with Faculty applications for organs. This took him back into the organ world and he remained adviser on organs to the London DAC until his death, his final project for them being advice on a proposed large new organ for St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield.

He shared with his architect-trained father a passion for church architecture and good organ case design, enjoying singing in the choir of St John the Evangelist, Friern Barnet, a beautiful Gothic church by Pearson, where his funeral service will take place on 28 February. John had always enjoyed writing. In 1966 he co-authored with his father his first book, The Organ Today, bringing out a revised second edition in 1980. He began writing his column – Soundboard – in Organists’ Review in January 1980 and maintained it until his death. From 1983-2000 he was founding editor of The Organbuilder (the journal of the Institute of British Organ Building) and in 1984 he published The Organs of Britain – a substantial ‘Appreciation and Gazetteer’ of British organs, illustrated, as so many of his writings were, with fine line drawings by his father. His final books, notable for their attractive design and appearance, were The Box of Whistles (2007, about organ cases over the ages) and Organ Works (2020, subtitled ‘What is an organ and how does it work?’).

A founder-member of the Association of Independent Organ Advisers, John acted as consultant for numerous significant organs over the last 30 years of his life. The most exquisite of these was for the Undercroft of the Palace of Westminster (1999), the largest was for Worcester Cathedral (2008) and the final one will be a new instrument for St James’s Piccadilly, yet to be constructed.

John Norman will be remembered for his organ projects, his books, and for his generous and warm personality.