Ringing Forums

"Munchausen" seems to be available as a method name...

Nice work.

No huge surprises I think, but I found the "How old you are when you start matters…" slide particularly interesting, as a late starter myself. It would be interesting to try to drill down as to why that's the case. For example, is it:

• The younger you are the quicker you learn and the further you get.
• It just takes a long time to become an advanced ringer, if you start late it's too late.
• Older starters just don't have the mental / physical capacity for it.
• There's an assumption that older starters won't amount to much and therefore appropriate teaching / mentoring is not offered.
• The advanced ringers are the ones who started early, had an aptitude and stuck at it, the less able dropped out, so there's selection bias going on.

I'm sure there are others as well, and it's going to be a combination of factors rather than just one.

There wasn't a detailed breakdown of how old people were when they started, other than the majority (57%) of current ringers started when they were over 21, and I suspect the average start age has moved up over the last decade or so.

83% of ringers want to improve their ringing, which obviously includes older ones. Whilst there's an understandable focus on youth opportunities I don't think older ringers should be forgotten, as at the moment they are the backbone of most towers, and will be for some considerable time, even if youth recruitment is successful.

"we" could only ring Plain Bob, Kent, Double Norwich, and maybe Cambridge 8.

"Only". Your starting point is way beyond many of the bands round here.

I can ring touches of Cambridge, I still class myself as a learner.

People tend to learn PB by bell number, the same way they learn PH, so bobs & singles are a big challenge. The average fare of 2 plain courses of PB5 a week = 4 dodges = a glacial pace of learning, As I remember, I decided to teach myself Double Oxford on the tower sim (easy to remember, lots of dodging), Treble Bob Hunt, then Oxford TB. But I've seen much more thought-through suggestions than that - on the St Martin's Guild website, perhaps?

I don't want to focus on my case as the important discussion is the more general one and I'm not the future of ringing here as I'm too old. But as you asked, first I learned how to learn methods properly, not by rote - there are good books on this but it does require being prepared to learn some theory. Then I went from PB to Cambridge on our tower sim, not in one jump but via a number of other methods, and during COVID. I'm the wrong side of 60, there was no ringing taking place so no band.

As for Cambridge 8, the challenge is finding a band who can ring it and who will let me ring it with them - but I do have a plan :wink:

I've heard the "arrange a practice" suggestion before, and whilst on the surface it seems like a solution, it really isn't. It doesn't scale up for everyone who needs helping, and as I already noted, there's no longer a big enough pool of ringers in this area to draw on to start with. And even if there was, fixing my problem wouldn't fix the much larger problem.

Yes organisation is an issue, but from what I've been told that's been the case here since well before I started ringing. Once the number of experienced and willing ringers drops below a critical threshold, no amount of "organising" can dig you out of the hole. Trying what may have sort-of worked in the past over and over again in the hope it might fix the current crisis is futile, a radically different approach is needed.

I think what you are seeing with your sim practices is the ever widening chasm between "ground floor" ringers and the "surprisers". It's a huge step from PB5 to Camb6/8, not helped by the piss-poor nature of PB as a teaching method compounded by the "by rote" way it is taught. Learning how to learn and how to ring "proper" methods pretty much means starting over for most people, which after endless PB, few have the stomach for. PB nearly finished my ringing career and I had to learn Camb6 (and now 8) unassisted on a tower sim - and it's going to be a challenge to get a chance to ring it "for real" on 8.

"harsh" might imply that it's not true, "direct" or "blunt" might be nearer to the mark :wink: The original observation was @Simon Linford's not mine - but from my experience he is spot on.

The only regular intermediate/advanced branch-style practice I'm aware of in the GM area has nothing to do with a branch, it's been organised by one individual. It seems to be primarily for people who can already ring at Surprise level, which I think is a measure of the scale of the problem - even people at that level are having to arrange special practices in order to get a ring.

Association level practices are mostly a wash, the closest towers to here are in 3 different associations and none of them are great - but from talking to people who were ringing here decades ago, it's never exactly been a hotbed of ringing.

I fully agree that you need "experienced ringers being willing to invest time to help developing ringers", but in my opinion there just isn't the critical mass here for that any longer - although I'd love someone to prove me wrong!

I hope this area is an outlier, but approaches based on the availability of sufficient experienced ringers to "bootstrap" things are I think probably unworkable here. The challenge is how to re-establish proper method ringing when to all practical intents, it's already died out.

From the blog post:

Seeding more regional ringing courses is in the strategy, but it was a bit concerning to learn that it was the entry level options on the NW course that were most over subscribed, the level that should be being catered for by local branches and associations. The course had tried to pitch itself a little higher up the learning curve.

Colour me utterly unsurprised.

Many associations in the NW seem to struggle to move people past CCs & PH. There's no widespread bedrock of help for the transition from that into methods, so the only option for many is to go on a course. But without ongoing support afterwards, that's pretty pointless. The advanced ringing that does take place is mostly in small, closed, increasingly elderly groups who want to only ring with people at their level and who aren't really interested in teaching.

The current generation are probably the end of method ringing here, other than a few isolated pockets. I think it's already too late to do anything about it, method ringers here have been sleepwalking towards oblivion for decades. If there is to be method ringing here in the future, it's going to mean starting over from scratch. And a once a year course won't cut it.

Amen to that, thank you Simon!

from playing catch up on FB, it seems first the method name was redacted but the performances were left, now that's been reversed and the CC is looking at renaming the method.

I agree that a band of happy and skilful CC ringers is preferable to a struggling band trying to unsuccessfully ring methods, but the culture in most of the country is that method ringing should be the ultimate goal - just look at the ART syllabus, for example. However for both forms you need to be able to strike well which means listening, not just looking. What you ring and how you ring it are related but separate issues.

I agree with every word, and I think it's difficult to overemphasise just how much ringing, at my level at least, is vision dominated. I recollect a long-standing ringer correctly identifying the cause of a PH fire-up, but when asked why they didn't just ring in the right place anyway the reply was "Because if I did, it would all go wrong" :gasp: That's completely wrong but it's unreasonable to blame people for that, or for the poor striking it leads to, because that's what they've been taught from the very start.

The traditional path from CCs to method ringing is that you "just" learn PH, then PB and hey presto, you are a method ringer. The truth is that if you've been taught the traditional way, you have to pretty much start over to learn to ring methods. When I grasped the scale of the challenge I very nearly gave up ringing, and it took around 9 months before I made any externally visible progress as I had to relearn how to ring. I know some ringers breeze through, but many don't and either drop out, or get stuck. Most teaching ignores the difficulty of the transition, and as a learner you have to a) realise it's required b) want to do it enough to put the effort in. As a result of that not happening, towers are full of people who believe they will become method ringers by just doing more of what they've already been taught.

I think we need to be up-front about the challenges of becoming a method ringer, rather than trying to push people on beyond the limits of their interest and/or abilities. If someone insists on trying to ring methods by bell number then I think we need to be truthful and tell them that they are wasting their time, and that they should concentrate on improving their skills at the level they are happy at.

hardly surprising that people fixate in a rope and blindly follow it, they are only doing what they were told to do as soon as they rang with other people. And hardly surprising that as soon as one person is out of place there's instant carnage as the rest of them blindly follow the rope in front. Whilst individual striking skills are clearly important, it's something that needs the whole band working together on.

The way the learning is happening is holding people back. — Martyn Bristow

I think you are completely right.

Currently, most teaching is usually done by the small percentage of people with high natural aptitude and who learned so long ago they can't remember learning. As such, teaching is geared to people who are the same, so learners are asked to jump straight from PH by-the-numbers to PB, and to simultaneously pick up ropesight, ringing by place, remembering a method and dodging. That still works for the small percentage who could always learn that way, but it does not work for people who have the potential to ring at a more advanced level, but who can't get there in one huge bound. It's not as if there aren't lots of resources out there for a more gradual approach, but many ringers are very resistant to change. If we want to increase the numbers of people ringing at a good standard we need to make continued progress more accessible rather than just recruiting more people who don't get much beyond PH.

The other side of the coin is the learners themselves. For some of them, no matter how much it's explained that you can't ring methods using a fixed sequence of bell numbers, they simply won't put in the effort to learn to ring by place. Even if they've claimed to have learned a methods, it is by bell number. Yet there's still "When we ring our first QP..." The blunt truth is that they won't, ever. Trying to push those learners beyond by-bell-number is pointless, and intensely frustrating experience for teachers. Better to accept they've decided to limit their progress and work on improving their skills at that level.

The problem is that graphite paste tends to get everywhere. The surface of our bells have been affected by pollution (mill town), in the past they'd have been black leaded, nowadays to get the same finish bellhangers use blackboard paint, which is what is on ours.

that's exactly what happened to the one above, the slider was ground down to about half it's thickness. I have put a thin layer of hard wax on the new ones (a quick rub with a candle) which doesn't collect any grit, but I'm not sure it made any appreciable difference.

• BBC, from 1952 but I don't seem to be able to hear the audio on it
• Lots of BBC ones here, but no dates

Mind you, I think some of them are best left unlistened to :grimace:

• Seven bells, poorly rung. St. Michael's parish church, Mytholmroyd.
• Church Bells: Outside St. Chad's Parish Church, Rochdale.

stays that are so strong they don't break and defeat the idea that the stay is a 'weakest link' to prevent damage to other parts of the installation — Robin Shipp

Here's an example of what happens if you use a tropical hardwood stay; its continual
pounding on the slider turned it into shredded wheat. And the liberal coating of grease on the runner board when mixed with stone dust from the steeple didn't help either.

I think your first one is going to be hard to top to be honest, I don't know of anyone who wants to cock things up.

Some more suggestions:

• I will not shout, it only makes things even worse
• I will dispense at least as much encouragement and praise as I do criticism
• I will not look down on those who are less accomplished than I am

most likely what would happen is the plastic would bend and jump over the slider, and the bell would go over anyway. It's the continued rotation of the bell that's violent, not the stay breaking, as anyone who has been unfortunate enough to make "the last tap" on an already cracked stay will tell you.

As anyone who has rung on sprung steel stays will attest, the flexibility makes setting the bell feel very odd, I think plastic would be similar. Plus the tendency of plastic to gradually deform under load means it would be unsafe to ever leave bells with plastic stays rung up.

I don't understand what you think the benefits over over ash would be.

Here's the effect on a slider of a combination of the wrong material being used for a stay (tropical hardwood) and smearing everything with grease, which mixed with stone dust coming down from the steeple:

because recycled plastic is unsuitable for the job. It sags under load (recycled plastic benches often have steel reinforcement in them) and it tends to bend rather than snap cleanly. Ash is eco-friendly and if not subject to abuse, can last for centuries.

One tip I was given which sounds odd but worked for me is to actively put the tail end into your right hand using your left hand - your left hand knows where the tail end is as it's got hold of it! It helped to stop me fishing around randomly with my right hand, which may be why your fingers are going through the loop.

Any organisation that wants to perpetuate itself needs to be recruiting constantly, I hope that’s not a revelation. — Alan C

You'd think so, wouldn't you? But the "demographic deficit" that's now causing so many problems for ringing seems to show that it isn't obvious, unfortunately.