Old Cathedral and Church of St Michael

I've a feeling that I've read that one of the reasons why the destruction of the cathedral was so great was the way they repaired the roof in the 1800s. From the early lantern slide you can see a very different roof to the one seen later in the photo from Coventry Digital of the October 14^th 1940. The description of the fire from the Birmingham Post and Mail - the team of four men spent the evening dashing around the cathedral roofs, attempting to rip open the lead with axes so that water could be poured onto the fires. The construction of the roof hampered the teams efforts, - the inner wooden vaulted ceiling being separated from the wood and lead sheeting outer roof by an eighteen inch gap, inside which many incediaries rested and blazed away, out of reach to the fire watchers. So originally the lead might have hugged the wooden roof inside and any penetrating bomb would have ended up in the cathedral interior, where it could have been seen and tackled?

Poole, in Coventry, It's history and antiquities says the pulpit was removed from the pillar in the north to one on the south. At the same time the organ and the seats for the choir were placed on a slight elevation from the floor at the extremity of the west end of the church, between the tower and the closed western porch. Helen, you know the location of the church better than me and I don't know if this makes sense and fits in with your knowledge of the layout !

It does, thanks Anne. We think of the old buildings as fixed but they were often moved around internally. The windows changed. The floor too. I've only just started looking at interiors.

I'm not sure if this view of the Sanctuary has been on HCF before but to me it has the most detail, and how I wish I had seen it as shown!

This video may be of interest Great Mistakes: Coventry's Lost Medieval Cathedral

Help please, I'm struggling to get my head around that photo. Unless it's much earlier than this century. The organ is missing?

The organ was just to the right of the photo.

Thank you Helen, Where are the pipes? Answered my own question. That's the Willis Organ dating from 1887. It was so small. Our chapel read organ had bigger pipes. What a pip!

Argon, Funsville at the very end!

What a well put-together video - a lot of work must have gone into that. The maker even made use of my hand-drawn city wall plans at the 2 minutes 49 seconds mark.... but I won't complain that there's no acknowledgement!

Was there a third organ? Or was there a little one for weekdays?