Glenn Miller organ gets a new lease of life

THE European Heritage Open Days last week allowed visitors to see - and play - an historic organ which was once operated by big band superstar Glenn Miller, not long before he disappeared and was never seen again.

In the summer of 1942 a pedal organ was presented to Gartree Church on the shores of Lough Neagh by the 8th Army Air Force whose Chaplain Reverend Norman Nygaard preached at a service in Gartree on 7th February 1943.

It is said that Glenn Miller worshipped in the church and played the organ on Sunday 13th August 1944 at a time when he was travelling around the UK, entertaining US armed forces personnel.

He had played in the camp cinema known as the ‘Project Magnet Hall’ to an audience of 750 after earlier performing at the Plaza Ballroom in Central Belfast which had become the American Red Cross Club.

It was only a few weeks later that the aircraft in which Glenn Miller was travelling was lost over the English Channel.

That very same organ has now been restored and will be on display and played by a number of local organists in Gartree Parish Church from time to time.

The church was open to the public last weekend and featured a historical talk by Mrs Elizabeth McBride and the unveiling of the newly refurbished Glenn Miller Harmonica, which was played by various local organists throughout the day, including Colin Ross, who dressed as Mr Miller for the day.

There was also local produce and memorabilia on sale, a display of local photography and vintage teas and refreshments on offer.

On a Sunday afternoon in the late summer of 1944, a pair of C-47 ‘Skytrain’ transport planes roared through the skies above Crumlin before shuddering to a halt on one of two runways at Base Air Depot No. 3, AAF Station 597 of the V111 Service Air Force Command - more commonly referred to as ‘Langford Lodge Airfield’.

From the green bellies of the parked planes disembarked a 28-piece dance band combo of the American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force, an ensemble led by a man responsible a musical phenomenon at the time hitherto unprecedented - famous the whole world over for the unique style of swing music he pioneered.

In just one four-year period charismatic bandleader Glenn Miller had 16 number one records and a further 69 top ten chart hits to his name.

With a string of timeless records such as ‘In The Mood’, ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ and his signature piece ‘Moonlight Serenade’ under his belt, Glenn Miller was one of the 20th century’s best-received performers and songwriters, and remains amongst the most fondly remembered.

The Iowan composer had been performing big-band and swing music since the mid-1920s, but the bulk of his renown came after he originated what became known as the classic ‘Glenn Miller Sound’ in the mid-1930s.

By 1939, Time Magazine noted that ‘of the twelve to 24 discs in each of today’s 300,000 U.S. jukeboxes, from two to six are usually Glenn Miller’s’ and, in 1940, his band’s version of ‘Tuxedo Junction’ sold an impressive 115,000 copies within only one week of its release.

A comfortable life of success and fortune loomed - but, as the contemporaneous crisis in Europe spiralled out of control into the wildfire of a world war, Miller’s sense of duty was apparently too strong to stand by in apathetic stateside luxury.

In 1942, Miller opted to forsake his weekly income of $20,000 per week (equivalent to some $315,000 today) to join the war effort. At 38, he was considered too old to be drafted into the United States military, and, upon volunteering himself for the Navy, was told his services were not required.

Not discouraged, Miller then wrote to Army Brigadier General Charles Young in the hopes of persuading the US Army to accept him so he could, in his own words, ‘be placed in charge of a modernized Army band’.

His offer was accepted and, upon reporting for duty in the Army Air Forces (the air force at the time not yet a separate branch within the armed forces), Captain Glenn Miller formed a 50-piece band which he took with him to England in the summer of 1944. There, he gave some 800 performances for war-weary civilians and Allied troops alike.

In the meantime, the recently promoted Major Miller recorded several shows to be aired on AFN Radio, broadcasting with the intention of raising the spirits of the hard-pressed Allied forces fighting the Nazis in Western Europe.

“America means freedom,” the famous bandleader said in one such broadcast, “and there's no expression of freedom quite so sincere as music.”

Indeed, after the war, General Jimmy Doolittle retrospectively praised the work of Glenn Miller and his band as “next to a letter from home… the greatest morale builder in the European Theatre of Operations.”

Against this backdrop of all-out conflict, Glenn Miller made one of his only ever Northern Irish concert appearances at Langford Lodge on August 13th 1944. Once a picturesque stately home - previously serving as the home estate of the Pakenham and Langford families - situated by the shoreline of Lough Neagh, the lodge and its environs had recently been transformed into a bustling hive of wartime activity as one of the UK’s four main base air depots.

In this capacity, the Langford Lodge base was home to 3,227 United States Army Air Force personnel, 1,906 Lockheed local civilian employees and 1,540 Lockheed American contracted employees - not to mention a sizeable contingent of battle-ready A-20, B-17, and B-24 bombers of the United States 8th and 9th Army Air Forces.

So large was the base at Langford that considerable attention was paid to the allocation of recreation areas for the American airmen, including but not limited to the construction of bowling alleys, baseball pitches and ice-cream making facilities. Langford Airbase even had its very own radio show - the ‘Nit Wit Network’ - not to mention a cinema and a theatre, the latter of which was known to servicemen as the ‘The Project Magnet Hall’.

It was in this hall that Glenn Miller and his band performed on August 13 1944.

Over the course of his visit, the prolific performer also made a detour to the nearby Gartree Church of Ireland on the outskirts of Crumlin village, a popular place of worship among the GIs stationed at Langford Lodge.

There, he treated the congregation to an intimate performance, tinkling on the church’s pedal organ many of his own wartime hits - including ‘In The Mood’- alongside hymns like ‘Abide With Me’.

The organ - which still remains as a prized momento of the special occasion - was itself a gift to the church from the aforementioned US 8th Army Air Force.

Before leaving the Antrim area that evening with his swing orchestra to entertain more troops at Belfast’s Plaza Ballroom, Miller was moved by an unnamed local youth who took to the improvised stage for a rendition of ‘Danny Boy’.

Impressed by the young man’s talent, Glenn Miller promised to meet him again at the end of the war to talk about building a professional career in showbusiness for him - but, sadly, it was not to be.

On December 15th, 1944, Miller boarded a single-engine US Army UC-64 ‘Norseman’ aircraft and flew out from an airfield near Bedford. He was en route to the recently liberated French capital of Paris, apparently intent on making arrangements to move his band there for a residency. He never arrived at his destination.

The circumstances surrounding Glenn Miller’s disappearance are shrouded in some degree of mystery. Among the unsubstantiated conspiracy theories promulgated about Miller's fate both during and after the war include that Miller was assassinated whilst on a top-secret mission to make peace with Nazi Germany, that he suffered a heart attack in a Parisian brothel, or that he died as a victim of friendly fire when his plane was hit by jettisoned bombs dropped by Allied bombers returning from an aborted mission to Germany.

The most likely theory pertaining to the bandleader’s death, however, has it that his plane flew into cold weather over the stormy English Channel and experienced carburetor icing. This caused the aircraft to lose power and ditch into the freezing waters of the Channel.

Any survivors would have died of hypothermia within 20 minutes, but, unfortunately, neither wreckage nor the bodies of the three men onboard have ever been found.

Yet, decades after his death, the music of Glenn Miller - and the memories of that eventful August night at Langford in 1944 - live on.

So fondly remembered was his local performance that in 2004 a commemorative 60th anniversary show was held at Belfast International Airport courtesy of the Antrim Borough Council and the Ulster Aviation Society.

Authentic World War II era vehicles and memorabilia were on display to enhance the nostalgic atmosphere as, once again, an orchestra bearing the Miller name played - the band being led for the occasion by Glenn’s own nephew, John Miller.

The John Miller Orchestra evocatively resurrected the magical big band stylings of the ‘Glenn Miller Sound’ for music fans old and new, with some members of the audience having even been present for the 1944 event.

Among them was Warren ‘Brad’ Bradley, who, in 1944, was a sergeant with the Modification and Technical Control Section of 8th Air Force Service Command, stationed at Langford Lodge.

Although the war’s shifting frontline would later take him to postings in Paris and Munich, he distinctly remembered dancing the night away on August 13th, 1944 - and, keen to relive the bittersweet memories of his wartime service, he brought members of his family all the way from Michigan to hear the nephew of the great Glenn Miller play.

Glenn Miller may have been correct when he said that there is no expression of freedom quite so sincere as music - but, 80 years since the composer’s passing, his rich posthumous legacy emphatically proves that there is no catalyst for memory quite so potent as the music of days long gone.