Nancy’s UK Tour Journal: Theatre Organ

Inventing the organ

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Nancy-1Bonjour! It’s Nancy here – from the soon-to-be world famous pop group Nancy and the Meerkats!

After our first record “Put Your Paws Up” became a massive hit, we’re off on a huge tour of the UK!

We haven’t quite made it to stadium status yet – some of the venues are more Weeny than Wembley – but I’m going to be letting you know what’s been going on each day in my journal for Fun Kids!

Today was the very first date of the tour and I was a little bit surprised when we turned up at the venue – it looked like an old people’s home!

I checked with Big Joe (he’s our manager) but he was too distracted by this really, really, really old instrument called a theatre organ!

Doesn’t he know Nancy and the Meerkats are supposed to be the coolest band in all the world? We don’t want to be bothering with things that are hundreds of years old!

But according to Big Joe, the guy who invented it was almost as cool as us!

He was called Robert Hope-Jones and was building organs almost 130 years ago! They were so much bigger and better than anything before that some people thought they’d replace orchestras!

I told Big Joe that Nancy and the Meerkats are going to be bigger and better than anything before in pop music but he wasn’t impressed!

Mr Hope-Jones was such a success that he left his home in Birkenhead to take his inspiring ideas to America and ended up joining the famous, music-making Wurlizer brothers!

Robert patented dozens of inventions! Big Joe explained to me earlier that patenting is a way to protect things you invent!


What is patenting?

A patent protects inventions.

How they are work, what they do, how they do it, what they are made of and how they are made. It means that no-one can copy, make, sell or import your invention without your permission.


One of Robert’s other famous patents was a Diaphone horn which is what lighthouses use to warn ships!

Big Joe suggested we try out the organ and see if we could use it in our of our shows!

Quelle horreur! Imagine what that terrible tabby Kitty Perry would say if she heard that we had an organ in the show!

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She’d tell everyone we were all about OAPs when we wanna be all about the OMGs!

But then we tried it out and it sounded amazing – a bit like the noise our keyboards make but much, much louder!

We’re about to go on stage now – hopefully the fans will love it!

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