Ringing Forums

I agree that not having a recruitment initiative for the coronation would have been a very big missed opportunity. It had to be done. I agree that from a post*-pandemic perspective the time is now right. I have watched the recruitment video and it is excellent. The links with national media have been very well handled. What has been done at the centre/top is worthy of much praise.

But there is a but. I am a member of three associations/guilds. I don't think there has even been a mention in dispatches from any of them yet. Chatting down the pub it seems that those that knew about the initiative had heard items in the national media, not through ringing channels.

ART, reasonably, seems to be at the centre of the training initiative. Have all the ART trained trainers been fully briefed yet?

*Not sure if we are fully post yet.

I have got a USB floppy drive and a USB CD drive just in case. A problem I have had is the current software not reading old files;an issue that John has mentioned.

One significant change is the average age of ringers. One thing I am confident about is that the average age of ringers will not continue to increase indefinitely.

With regard to night school type classes I recall an ART meeting in Worcester a bit back where a couple of ringers who had been doing just that gave a talk. If only I could remember who they were...

Organising ringing outside of existing structures brings worries about liability and insurance. These worries would reduce if we were members of a DMO.

Organisations like preserved railways seem to work well with a mixture of paid professionals and volunteers.

Thank you. Of course I have now found my copy, which was probably sent to me by Roger too.

I am sure that I have seen a copy of the full 1988 survey report but I can't find it or a link to it. Can anyone provide a link to a copy?

I agree. I think a direct approach will be needed to chase up replies if the data is to be meaningful. Is the branch/district structure robust enough to achieve that these days?

Do we need to run some sort of stress test to see if the existing Guld/Association, district/branch set up would be able to collect the data?

Firstly, thank you very much indeed to those who are taking an active interest in this topic and have the technological skills and motivation to make something happen.

I am inclined to agree with John that it would be good to contact each individual ringer. But we don't have any obvious workable system for that. Random sampling would be a possibility but obtaining a random sample, free of bias, would, I think, be difficult.

I also agree that the range of questions and those surveyed needs to be much narrower in scope than the 1988 survey.

I think concentrate on individual ringers and TCs. I think I would go a little bit broader than Jason's questions. These seem to address numbers and the requirement for new ringers and ability to provide initial training. If we are going for a full survey I think we should also try to get a feel for levels of experience and capacity to provide continuing T&D.

If all we worry about is getting people on the end of a rope and make the bell go dong there is no future for method ringing.

Historically I think that personal development in ringing has largely been DIY. I learnt to handle, ring rounds and calls and some basic change ringing at my local tower. After that I cycled round the area most nights of the week to tower practice nights where friendly and helpful local bands aided my progression. Then I got scooped up by some peal and qp fixers. In more recent years I have rung with various qp bands, fixing them myself if there was something I wanted to ring or for someone else to have a go at something. Guilds and Associations, or anything formal, did not figure much in this.

As noted above these informal structures are starting to break down. The tower model started crumbling some time back. Now there are signs that the number of peals and qps might not recover to pre pandemic levels.

We need formal structures now not just for initial training but for continuing development. And I don't think the traditional monthly open branch practice comes close to addressing this.

If we are going to sort this out somehow we need to convince guilds and associations that they need to take T&D a lot more seriously and not just fix social events with a bit of ringing thrown in.

If we don't then the number of peal and qp ringers will continue to decline and the median ringer will ring call changes.

Not getting on me high horse or anything but:

https://www.ringingforums.org/page/ringingforums-policy

"Users shall register and post under their real name"

I don't think that pseudonyms help. I always use my real initials.

Have a careful read of the President's Blog number 70. (see recent thread on this forum). The content of the blog might assist with your difficulty.

"...while there may be a chap down the pub who thinks we’ve already called last orders on ringing's future, others see a bright future worth striving for."

Next time I am down the pub I will try to sort him out.

Looking at old reports my impression is that in the Good Old Days a lot of ringers rang a few peals but now a few ring a lot. Going back a few decades the median ringer might have rung a peal or two.

Then there is the question of how to collect the information.

Contact every ringer? Probably impossible.

Sample of individual ringers? Difficult to obtain true random sample and thus avoid bias.

Contact every tower? If this is done by issuing the questions to the tower contacts it can be a right old game getting replies and I suspect that RMs/TCs who do reply want to set themselves in as good a light as possible and might tend to give an overly generous description.

Perhaps best done by visits to towers? I know some surveys have been done this way before. Perhaps anyone who has been involved in doing it this way could comment?

And of course the "tower band" is a bit of a vague concept given the amount of clustering and helping out that goes on.

Interesting question as to how much of the funding for the training should come from those learning and how much from some form of taxation from ringers in general. We will need to take care not to exclude people from learning because they can't afford it. We would not want to end up spending large amounts of time teaching people who have lots of spare cash but making little progress while not teaching those with exceptional potential who don't, would we?

And I suspect that the St Clement's type initiative is far more likely to take place in more prosperous parts of the country. A Central Membership organisation would enable subs to be collected on a national basis and spent where it is needed nationally and this would help with levelling up. And at association level perhaps there could be a training levely/component of the subs to help run ringing centres.

And yes, I am being political.

The data on peals rung is available from PealBase; and no I don't know how to extract it. We don't know what the ringing population is because we don't collect data in anything approaching a statistically meaningful way. We can guess.

Here we go:

RW 4/2/22 p116

The Shirley Rymer ‘Review’ 1999

"‘(a) The Branch
should be fairly compact shape … (b) Church
groupings should be respected … (c) Natural
groups should be respected e.g. village/
town clusters … (d) Ringing links should be
considered e.g. towers whose ringers often
visit each other’s practices … (e) Strongly felt
historical links should be noted.’ Shirley’s
proposals were not adopted."

Having re-read it the list really only applies to the bottom structure such as clusters, districts, branches and does not mention people as such.

I agree that people as well as structures need to be considered. I also agree that just swapping one regional organisation with another might not, in itself, bring solutions. There are a number of factors to consider. There was a series of articles about the history of the Salisbury Guild in the RW a bit back (written by Robert Wellan?). In one of those articles there was reference to proposed branch restructuring. I don't think that the restructuring took place but someone had put up a list of criteria that, IIRC, was a very useful list for looking at structures, and not just branches. I'll try to find it. Others might well be quicker than me.

Personally I am at a point where I don't think that much by way of solution is now possible, at least not some over-arching plan. I think we are more at the stage of trying to pull bits out of a crumbling heap and trying to get something to work at a locallish level, best we can. Probably always been like that.