Ringing Forums

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.

This is a known problem with LED lighting, and is usually a function of cost - cheaper = more flicker. The only realistic fix is to change to lighting to something that's adheres to a low-flicker standard, but that's inevitably going to be more expensive than some cheap no-name LED fixtures.

• https://www.instyleled.co.uk/what-causes-led-flicker-and-how-can-i-stop-it-happening/
• https://www.waveformlighting.com/flicker-free-led-lighting
• https://www.led-professional.com/resources-1/articles/flicker-standards-and-test-methods

As a relatively older and relatively recent starter I think you are right about "Peak Peal" having being passed. I can't see myself ever ringing peals even if I could, due to time constraints - I'm still working full-time, and expect to be for most the next decade, by which time I'll be in my late 60s. Even QP opportunities are relatively scarce for me and they are long enough for my taste anyway. When I do get to ring QPs my ringing has definitely improved afterwards. But until the last month or so I'd had a 2 year gap (not by choice) so for me it was like starting over from scratch when we rang a couple of QPs of PB6 at practices, when we met short with 6 ringers.

the most prolific peal ringers I know are exactly as you describe - they have being ringing since their youth and are now retired. I think your other observations are on the money as well. Although in the case of my home tower, it's never got beyond CCs for many decades, so I don't think the issues are entirely new.

I was talking to one of the long-standing ringers at a practice yesterday after a touch of Oxford Minor had been rung and he mentioned that Oxford was the basis of other methods such as Sandal, Capel etc. I've taught myself to ring spliced Oxford Group on the tower sim, but I've realised I'll be unlikely to ever learn to ring them 'for real'. He carried on to say "They used to be rung around here a lot, but none of those people are ringing any more". Ringing higher numbers is obviously important, but in many areas even quality Minor ringing is becoming scarce, and if it's a struggle to find 6 people to ring methods, you are even less likely to find 8, 10 or 12.

I found it - chapter 10 of "The Bellringer's Bedside Companion". The two seem to cover same territory and the CC one has the advantage of being free ;-)

Our spire is empty above the bells and the wind tends to spiral inside and dislodge anything loose from the stonework. Before the rehang we had literally inches of stone dust and dirt on the floor under the bells. Apart from the damp it traps, it can also get inside pulley bearings - our old ones were rubbish anyway, but where destroyed by grit ingress. About every 6 months or so I vacuum all of it up.

I think one of Steve Coleman's books also has something on the subject?