Giving musical expression to a passion for life
Late on the coldest Christmas Eve I can ever remember, my wife and I arrived at the basilica in Christchurch’s Barbadoes St to play in the orchestra for midnight mass. We climbed the tightly curving iron staircase to the organ loft and sat there shivering and wondering why on earth we had agreed to Don Whelan’s persistent requests to come and play. As soon as Don gave the first downbeat we knew here was a man possessed of a direct musical hotline to God. It was joyful, it was uplifting and we will never ever forget that night.
Don’s father, Bryan, was a teacher before becoming a school principal. He loved planting trees and, in good Kiwi tradition, loved his sport. Don’s mother, Elsie, was also a schoolteacher and a real homemaker who spoilt and overindulged her only child.
Bryan led a busy life as he was very active in Rotary, so was often out in the evenings. Don, however, remembers his dad coming home, going to the piano and playing Chopin as Don drifted off to sleep. Elsie loved to sing and Don has very fond memories of them singing together.
Elsie was a Presbyterian, so Don would help her with the church flowers on a Saturday, and on Sunday he would go to the Catholic mass with his dad. Don said he was covering all his options.
Don describes his Huckleberry Finnlike childhood, growing up in Wyndham (near Invercargill), as being almost idyllic.
He rode his bike, climbed trees and flew model planes. Looking back, Don realised that probably the reason he was so happy building and flying these planes was due to the high level of acetate in the glue.
Quirky Don was sent off to Southland Boys’ High School with the intention that the school would make a man of him. Don said it never succeeded as he was not interested in rugby or the military discipline that was central to school life.
Even though most of the schoolmasters had returned from World War II and were determined there would never be another war, a lot of time was spent wearing khaki, marching around and handling rifles.
Don developed a love for tennis but found rugby terrifying when “7-foot-tall farmers’ sons” came charging at him.
Don was proudly nerdy and learned the piano from a formidable lady with a glass eye. He didn’t really shine at this because he really didn’t like doing boring things like learning lots of scales. He did, however, continue to play for his own enjoyment and curiosity throughout his school and Dunedin Teachers’ College days.
Don was delighted to find the ratio of female to male students at college was 10 to 1 and for someone like him, a geeky adolescent, it was a liberating environment. He did confess that, despite these promising odds, he still had no luck whatsoever with the girls.
The highlight of these college days for Don were the classes where everyone would sing together. “The mundane realities of life were held at bay by this special world of music – it was heavenly.”
On finishing his studies, Don’s first posting was to Hornby Primary School in Christchurch, where he met his wife, Beris. Beris was teaching in a neighbouring classroom and kept good supplies of coloured chalk in her classroom storeroom. It was amazing how often Don had to call on her for replacement chalk.
Eventually Don invited Beris out, but her staunch Methodist parents were not at all happy. Not only did Don ride a motorbike, but he was also a Catholic.
Things only got worse when Don and Beris stopped at a coffee place on the way home from their first date. Beris decided to have a Pimm’s – she had no idea what a Pimm’s was, but when she got home and told her parents, they were scandalised.
Don found his first year in the classroom quite stressful, so in the evenings when he got home he would sit at the piano and plonk his way slowly through the Bach preludes and fugues.
This was strangely therapeutic and he said it reminded him of his father playing Chopin all those years earlier.
At this stage Don had not really studied music and certainly had not done any music exams, although he had completed an MA in English. Of all the things he did, music made him feel special.
Before Beris and Don married, they went shopping for a church that would accommodate their diverse religious backgrounds. Beris had been a Methodist lay preacher and, as I mentioned, Don had helped with flower arrangements for the Presbyterians in Southland and was a card-carrying Catholic. The church they settled on was Christ the King Catholic in Memorial Ave.
Don said he sort of fell into playing the harmonium at that church when he was asked to accompany its choir: a group of 15 cigar-smoking Dutchmen. They spoke only Dutch and loved singing three-part Latin songs that they had known since their childhoods in Holland.
For Don, accompanying them on the harmonium was another window into something new and quite exciting.
In the wake of the Vatican Council, congregational singing in English displaced the Dutchmen, the church acquired an electronic organ, and Don threw himself into mastering this new instrument and enthusiastically leading a new choir.
Don decided he should learn to play the organ properly, so Ellen Armitage, from the Oxford Tce Baptist Church, gave Don some lessons and he decided he should sit a music exam.
He entered for an ATCL (Associate of Trinity College London) exam and later acquired an LRSM (Licentiate of the Royal Schools of Music) and an FTCL (Fellowship of Trinity College London). Don didn’t stop there because he then completed a bachelor of music at Canterbury University with Bill Hawkey and John Ritchie.
Don had moved from primary school teaching to taking a job as an English teacher at Avonside Girls’ High. He loved teaching poetry and drama and the girls responded to his enthusiastic teaching style. He said: “Just like with the world of music, poetry and literature are beyond the here and now, it’s another heavenly world.”
From Avonside, Don went to teach English at the then quite new Burnside High School. This school was light years away from his experiences at high school and he loved it. Even though Don was in the English department, he established the now famous Burnside Chorale.
Don spent 12 years at Burnside and then, after two years on a study scholarship in England, he put his English teaching behind him to become the head of music at St Bede’s College.
Although Don had not trained as a music teacher, he found this teaching rewarding and discovered it was useful to feign an interest in rugby to draw the very best out of his students. He taught at St Bede’s for 15 years before moving to head up the music department at Christchurch Boys’ High, where he remained until he retired.
Back in 1969 Don was asked if he would like to be the organist at the Catholic Basilica. At that stage the Cathedral Choir had disbanded so Don was given firm instruction that he was required only to play the organ and was not to be a choir master.
“I was given a list of the hymns to play each Sunday and would be sitting there in a refrigerator with a little one-bar electric heater.” Perched in the organ loft at the rear of the basilica with his back to proceedings was not quite the job he had hoped for.
Because of Don’s experience conducting choirs and his knowledge of and enthusiasm for the rich wealth of choral music, it was not surprising that he established CBS Music Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament Choir and Orchestra.
Not even the visionary Don Whelan could comprehend what extraordinary things would flow from this.
Soon Don was directing weekly musical masses with his newly formed fine choir and orchestra that would thrill the most sophisticated congregations anywhere in the world.
It was only a matter of time before he began leading hugely successful international music tours to perform in leading cathedrals.
The first was to Europe in 1990 and this was followed by tours every five years to Europe, the Americas and Asia. How extraordinary that 135 singers, instrumentalists and supporters from our Barbadoes St performed a High Mass in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Bach Mass in B minor at St Peter’s in the Vatican. Don’s imagination and determination simply knew no bounds.
After the Christchurch earthquakes, the basilica lay as a stark reminder of the tragedy our city had lived through. On the day the heavy machinery arrived ready for the demolition to start, Don happened to be driving down Barbadoes St. He went onto the site and spoke with the guy operating one of the big machines.
This very helpful man told Don they were going to start the next day. The diocese had given the man’s company carte blanche to demolish everything and it was now its property, so it could do whatever it wanted with it.
Don asked what was going to happen to the organ and was told he could have it if he could get it out.
Don mobilised some of his passionate musical friends and hired two huge cranes at a cost of $40,000 to winch the organ out. He said the organ flew through the air until it was gently placed on the ground. I asked him where the necessary money had come from for this daring rescue and he said modestly that “we found it”.
He explained that this was no ordinary instrument. It was a Halmshaw three-manual organ built in Birmingham in 1878 by an organ maker who was in his 80s. Two identical organs were sent to New Zealand. One went to First Church in Dunedin and the other to the basilica in Christchurch.
The Dunedin organ now resides in the Presbyterian church in Palmerston North. The Christchurch Halmshaw is regarded as a superb instrument and anyone who heard it would wholeheartedly agree.
Like so many people, Don is hoping desperately for a happy end to this story but in the meantime this emperor of an organ sits in a container in the yard of the South Island Organ Company in Timaru.
Everything in life changes and the Catholic diocese had a change of heart and stopped funding CBS Music as, in its wisdom, it didn’t see that performing sacred music that had stood the test of centuries was still relevant to the modern church. Despite this, Don continues with a fiery enthusiasm every Sunday at the 11am mass at St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, Manchester St.
He is undoubtedly an unstoppable musical force because he loves it, and his choir and orchestra love it too.
As our frenzied, energetic and highly inspiring interview came to an end, I said to Don, “your vision for life is unlimited”.
Don replied: “Why not? – why have limits? You’re only a blip in a historical continuum. You take the baton from the teachers who were important to you and you hold it for a very brief time before you pass it on to the next baton holder. That’s where I see myself. It’s humbling, but isn’t that what it’s all about?”
I then asked how he coped when he had to work with people who were happy to have limits. Don replied: “I go and talk to Beris.”
He said it was important to have dreams and illusions but it was also important to keep them in a box that you could close at times, otherwise you would go crazy.
Finally, I asked Don what on earth would he do without Beris? Don said: “Exactly!”