Ringing Forums

You could do a halfway house and publish it in PDF or an eBook format. That would allow it to be saved on a phone and still used when there's little/no signal. PDF would preserve the video links, for when there is a signal. And it's possible to get a PDF printed as a book quite cheaply online - one site quoted me less than £5 for a one-off print.

I've done a very rough and ready conversion of the web pages to PDF, link below. Ideally you'd take the existing content and author it directly into EBook format using something like Calibre, which is free.

I think your second paragraph is an accurate summary. I suspect teaching and progression has never been great round here, but in the past when more people were starting it was always possible to "muddle through" and the consequential attrition didn't matter. That's a luxury that can no longer be afforded - every new ringer is precious.

There are mechanisms, but they are not cheap. It's all part of the increasing balkanisation of the internet, I'm afraid.

Yes, I go along to a their weekly practice. But they are also short of ringers - it's an 8-bell tower but there are usually only 6-7 of us. I don't mind the travelling, it's more that it's a symptom of there being effectively no method ringing and therefore no way for me to progress any further, this side of Manchester.

I think the changes are slim, unfortunately. The geographical area in question is split across 4 different associations - Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire & Derbyshire. Whilst there is some movement between the small number of towers that are still active it's limited. The experience level is not great - most towers are CC only, and struggle with PH. Most of the long standing ringers are elderly and have never got beyond CC/PH, so there's nowhere for new recruits "to go to" in terms of progression. Change ringing is effectively dead in the area - there are a couple of surprise-level towers outside the immediate area but they tend to keep themselves to themselves. I have to travel to the opposite side of Manchester to do anything more advanced, and I'm reliant on the goodwill of the ringers there as I can't service ring there, for example, as I'm helping keep the last remaining tower in my town going.

Myself and a couple of others are trying our best but it's a monumental struggle. I helped get our bells rehung in 2018, we had a simulator installed and I've been on the ART bell handling course and got 2 people almost to the point where they were just about ringing on their own - then, COVID...

The problem isn't bells - we have empty towers full of them - it's people, and momentum.

It has to be said that the East side of Manchester has been a blackspot for a very long time, from what I've been told - long before I started ringing.

My real concern is that once the last core of ringers is gone it may be practically impossible to restart things, and all the towers in the area will become permanently silent.

There are plenty of ringers about and the old guilds and associations keep the social networks going.

You must be ringing on a completely different planet to me. Where I am the local associations are mostly moribund and the majority of towers in the area are silent because there are no ringers left to ring them. That's not hyperbole, in my town only 1 of the 3 towers is still ringing, and it's even worse in the wider area. For example in Tameside there's a 12 bell in a Georgian Grade 1 listed church that are not rung, and the church itself is likely to be shut down.

http://www.tamesidehistoryforum.org.uk/bellringing.htm

And that's the situation 2 years ago - the numbers ringing in the 2 most active towers have more or less halved since then. A population of 1/4 million and probably only 20 active ringers.

I know two under 20s ringers and neither of them adjust the rope. In fact one of them has positively dangerous handling. If people aren't actively taught the extra handling skills needed to move from CCs to methods then they won't magically do it, no matter what their age. And I mean "actively taught", not "expected to pick up by osmosis" which is the way it always appears to have been in the past.

I agree with all of that.

those first two brief paragraphs of yours are one of the most concise and precise summaries of the problems I've seen.

What's immensely frustrating, speaking as one of the "squeezed middle", is that at the CC level the issues seem very well understood but they don't really have the ability to deliver the required changes. And the level that should be doing so (territorial associations) the problem is either not recognised, ignored or the efforts to address it are pathetically inadequate. I've long thought that territorial associations are an anachronism that's long outlived their usefulness, in many cases they seem to be not much more than closed shops for existing method ringers. I don't think they can be "fixed" and should just be left to rot.

There is already a mechanism in place that mostly bypasses the territorial associations - ART. But as I've said before, whilst it works well at the lower levels it doesn't have what's needed to effectively transition people into method ringing, because it is focused on the individual learner, teacher & tower, and that's not sufficient for teaching method ringing. There was talk some time ago of "ART Hubs" but I'm not sure what, if anything, became of that.

Sorry to hear you are ill, hope it's mild!

Looking forward to the Devon CC writeup though :-)

From my own painful progress I'd agree with that, none of my skills were up to the challenges of method ringing, and I had to go fix that myself, ringing solo on a tower simulator. Learners ringing in a poor band just generates more poor ringers, and many bands who are teaching learners are poor.

I've been on the Module 1 (bell handling) course, have used it to teach 2 people (until COVID interrupted) and found it very helpful, as did the learners who appreciated the structured and stepwise approach. I've watched TCs at a couple of towers "teaching" ringing up "the old school; way" and it was frankly terrifying, both for the learner and the rest of us stood by watching...

If ART is being used should be reasonably obvious as the learners should have been given log books, which are filled in as they progress.

Why do we persist in this way? I think that for those who are doing the teaching it is the way they learnt and how, in decades past, they taught — A J Barnfield

I think that's a common issue. Many teachers only know how they learned, and if that doesn't work for someone they are teaching, things immediately stall. An example: I asked what I needed to do to get ropesight. "Watch how all the bells come down in order" was the answer, to which I replied "I can't" which was met by a look of blank incomprehension. There are other ways of achieving the same effect but I had to figure them out myself. That shouldn't have been the case.

I think the penny that needs to drop is that, as a generality, a different approach is needed for older folk with much smaller steps and much more rope time. And an acceptance that some would best stick to call changes. — A J Barnfield

Yes, and a toolkit of different approaches so if one thing doesn't another one might. ART is great at codifying that in the early stages, later on it just seems to be left up to the individual teacher.

Where was that talk? — Simon Linford

It was at a Whiting Society practice day. It certainly generated a lot of discussion, most of it agreeing with the analysis of the issues and there was also a good degree of agreement on approaches that didn't work and ones that did. I don't have a copy yet but it's going out to the Derbyshire Association mailing list shortly, I can pass a copy on once I receive it.

Phil's book sounds very interesting, I'm keen to see it :smile:

We've had some success with Single Court Minimus with 2 covers. We have 3 who can ring it inside, it's dodge-free so you don't have to immediately cross that bridge, the treble is something other than PH order so it moves that ringer on, the 5ths is covering but again not PH bell order and the 6th can concentrate on striking well behind the 5th, so it's got something for most of the band in there. It sounds quite nice and it's a "proper" method so it ticks the sense of achievement box as well. I'm sure there are lots of other similar things you can do and I think that a "Growing your skills toolbox" approach is far better than "PB5 Or Death". ART do already have a "Minimus toolbox" with methods graded by difficulty, so there are support materials out there as well.

The Devon CC thing sounds like it would fit well into our tower which has been mainly CC + attempts at PH for many decades. Is there any HOWTO material available? I understand the general principles but I've never rung Devon style myself and if we do try it I'd like to do it justice rather than coming up with some sort of naff "Chicken Korma" version :wink:

good comment, where's the goddam like button. Oh, wait... :razz:

There are barriers beyond Bob Minor which are quite difficult to overcome — Simon Linford

One of them being PB itself, particularly due to the way it is taught, which turns it into a dead end even if the method itself isn't. PB5 is a poor choice of teaching method in the first place, I used to get two plain courses of PB5 a week, how the hell was I supposed to learn to dodge properly with just 4 dodges a week?

There's a big jump in the core ringing skills needed to move beyond PB-by-the-numbers, and in my experience they simply aren't taught. So lost of ringers get stuck struggling and failing to ring PB5-by-the numbers for literally years.

I listened to a very interesting talk yesterday that focused on exactly these issues with the "traditional progression" teaching and how they might be addressed. For example bell control training mostly stops after you are unlikely to kill yourself. *All* the skills need continual, integrated teaching rather than "Done that, next".

The more interesting question is what is the median point for those who lave learnt to ring in about, say, the last decade or two?

I think it's worth distinguishing between "can ring reliably, bobs, singles & all" and "working towards it". I suspect PB6 is not the median for ringers in the late-starters group. PH5 is more likely I think.

I think that anyone who gets to ART level 5 is a bit of a star. How many new ringers get much beyond that?

Last time I looked the attrition rate between L1 and L5 was 95%. If that isn't a sign that things aren't working in the upper ART stages, I don't know what it is, but it seems to pass without comment, let alone action.

ART is great up to around L3 but unless you live in an area with lots of active towers and strong bands, it's pretty much useless beyond that. The ART syllabus becomes much more spotty and the over-reliance on QPs is a mistake IMHO. I've got to L4, if I squint at the requirements hard I think I probably need one QP of Grandsire5 for L5 but I've already rung 2 QPs of the "harder" PB6 and I've taught myself or am learning Kent, Oxford, the other 4 Oxford Group methods, Stedman, Grandsire and Norwich. ART has been almost completely irrelevant to me for several years and if I get to L5 it will be as a by-product of other ringing I'm doing, not because of it.

If ART's goals is to get people ringing CC & PH for service ringing than I'd say it has been a great success. If it's to produce method ringers then it's an abysmal failure, even judging by their own stats.

I think I've only been to a handful of district practices since I started, I too find them very intimidating and don't get much from them. Targeted sessions with a clear emphasis on training are much more appealing because you feel less of an "imposition" - I think that's a pretty universal feeling at my level and something that's badly underestimated by most branch officers. Targetted sessions aren't a panacea either though, they often appear to be aimed at the people running them - "Improve your Bristol Max" etc - rather than the "Coarse Ringers" like myself.

Speaking of which, someone really needs to add a book to this series covering ringing ;-)
https://www.goodreads.com/series/167024-art-of-coarse

Even more interesting is why they get that far and no further.