Ringing Forums

How can you be sure that a fee, be it £10 or £100 will weed out only those who will never quite grasp the art of handling a rope or mastering the magic of change-ringing? It strikes me that there is better than a sporting chance that the fee will also weed out some of those 'magical' learners who take to it like the proverbial ducks to water.

Another option, either instead of or in addition to the installation of a defib unit is to arrange for ALL regular members of the team to attend a CPR course. You will need this expertise to aid the resuscitation of the casualty after applying the defib shocks. Without the defib unit, well maintained CPR may stabilise or conserve the casualty while someone scampers down to collect the defib unit from the nave and professional help arrives.

You should find that your local Fire & Rescue Service can provide CPR training free of charge to a group. And you will still need the CPR knowledge to follow-up the defib shocks and keep the patient alive.

We did exactly as Alsion implies - one of our ringes was in a position to 'requisition' a diseased ash tree whern it was felled and arranged for the trunk to be sawn into 1 metre lengths and then split into board of approx 3inches (75mm). After storage for several months the boards were split in into blank stays and then planed to the correct dimensions. The result - we have up to half a dozen spare stays for the bells most likely to suffer damage and a couple each for the tenors and trebles. They should outlast my lifetime!

I have been involved in the installation of two automatic defib units, one in our small village and one at a local retirement home. Both are mounrted externally and consequently need a mains electricity supply to maintain a 10w heater element that minimises the risk of condensation inside the cabinet. A dry tower with no damp problem may not need this. The units cost £1200- £1500 each.

The units need to be serviced after each usage - check batteries, adhesive pads etc. You need to establish a maintenance routine checking the batteries every few months.

Training was absolutely not a problem. our County Fire Service provided free hour-long training sessions with every installation. Don't be deterred - go for it! It may be worth inviting representatives of your Dean & Chapter to try legging it from the ringing room down those 200 steps and back again - and please ensure that they bring the defib up with them - they'll need it!

I'd go with the rope-mark theory. I have seen this effect in several towers. In fact at one of our neighbouring towers, the arched doorway was relatively low by modern standards and the ropes fell within a couple of inches of the wall. The ringer of the 5th stood within the archway with the door open; consequently some of the grooves were enhanced with bloodstains from bruised & grazed knuckles!

It's been done many times in the past. Newport Church in Middlesbrough (no bells) was intended to be the cathedral for the new victorian industrial town and seated almost 2000. Fifty years ago the congregation had dwindled to about 3 dozen and they abandoned the church and all worship and parish activities transferred to the adjacent church hall.

If you feel it is apprpriate to charge for assembling a band for filming, then perhaps the starting point for a fee would be the same as your charge for a wedding - at least

I suspect that such 'drying pods' as these are overkill, probably applying too much heat too quickly. Dry and soften the ropes too much and they risk becoming very stretchy.

Over the years RW and the chat-list have published several variations on the theme of a 6 foot legth of 6 inch diameter waste pipe, mounted on a stable base with a 40watt bulb at the bottom and connectred via a timer switch. Overall cost usually of the order of £20.

Don't blind them with the science of change-ringing, emphasise that success hinges on good team work.

You don't really need to spend money to recruit ringers. As I mentioned earlier, I found 4 recruits by talking about ringing for last year's Royal Jubilee on the local FB page. On a previous occasion I arranged to put a small display in the window of a regional building society - they like to have something unusual to attract attention to their otherwise rather bland savings adverts.

Our tower is quite accessible. Most summers we have a tower open day in August on a Sunday afternoon. There is no attempt to recruit although we usually have plenty of promo material on show and often run a very brief Ppt display on an endless loop. Visitors can visit the bells, see the clock mechanism and, in small groups, go on the roof to take photos across the roofs of the town. Then a few weeks later in early/mid September we will have a recruitment evening with ringing demo's and an opportunity for visitors to try their hands at a few pulls. We quite deliberately say nothing (unless asked) about change-ringing as we don't want to blind them with science.

We have has up to 180 visitors on the Sunday afternoon Tower Open Day; up to a dozen or more at the September recruiting night and most years we win two or three new recruits who stay the course and join the Sunday Service band. Probably not many towers are as accesible as ours, but most should be able to work out a local variation of the plan to suite their circumstances.

"Success breeds success", as someone wiser than me once remarked. The death or demise of ringing is not the right peg on which to hang a recruiting story. Very few people want to join a failing organisation. Look for the positive spin every time. Rather than 'ringing is on its last legs at Saint XX's church' try 'St XX's bellringerrs now have vacancies for new members'.
Our last recruiting drive was based on 'Do you want to say that you rang for the Queen's Jubilee? Join us - we'll teach you'. This brought in 4 adult recruits, 2 of whome have stayed the course and joined our regular Sunday Service band. 'Ring for the King' should be just as effective if it is promoted with positivity and imagination.

Aha! Happy memories of St Hilda's Church - 'over the border' in the depths of darkest dockland. After the church was declared redundant and stripped bare, a 'last ring' on the bells was arranged before the church was demolished. Part way through the session, on a Saturday afternoon, the police arrived and advised the ringers to terminate the meeting. Apparently the ringing was disturbing the sleep of the local ladies who worked a 'horizontal night shift' and a large crowd of their burly 'best friends' was milling around outside the church and threatening to sort out the ringers! The ringers were escorted to safety by the police.

St Hilda's Bells are now an 'architectural feature in Middlesbrough's modern town centre, standing opposite All Saints Church and with a pre-programmed touch of Erin Triples to drive their electro-magnetic 'bell sloggers'.

[img]http://St Hilda's bells opposite All Saints Church Middlesbrough.jpg[/img]

This happened 30 years ago in MIddlesbrough. The congregation diminished as the old urban terraced housing was replaced with new developments of car showrooms and light industrial units. The congregation of around 30 decamped to the adjacent church hall and the church was deconsecrated and sold. The single bell was retrieved and transferred to a neighbouring church.

I suggest that you contact SARABEC of Middlesbrough. They specialise in hearing loops and supply simple self-install kits for around £100. I have had an LA240 Loop system in my living room for over a decade.

Sarabec used to have an infra-red based system that requires the hearing aid user to wear an infra-red receiver. This eliminates any cross-interference with your existing church induction loop. The receiver is worn on a lanyard and must be in line of sight with the transmitter. Perhaps their latest Blue-Tooth system serves the same purpose.

Sarabec have always been most helpful and, as you have an existing system, it may be worth talking to them. https://www.sarabec.com/

"Has anyone tried taking a display along to a local community event"

A few years ago, we made up a set of three A2- sized (24" x 18" approx) display boards and arranged for them to be displayed in the 'shop window' of a local buidling society. They were happy to put them on display as it was 'something different' and attracted passers-by to pause and look in the window.

The 'selling points' were a little of the heritage and the fellowship of ringing along with the idea of maintaining a local service - nothing technical at all. I recall we gained 3 or 4 recruits over the weeks, a couple of whom stayed with us.

The key difference as I see it is that emails are delivered to my desk, as are notificaions from FB. I may have misunderstood but I believe that one has to go checking the other channels - Whats App and the like - to see if there are any messages. This is akin to having to call at the post office to see if there is any mail for me. That is not an improved service to my mind.

In a similar vein an organisation with which I serve as a trustee insists that emails are delivered by a secure service and I am expected to log into their MS365 workplace to see if there are any messages. There are about half a dozen per month yet I am expected to log in daily 'just in case'. This is not the way to communicate in the 21st century!

"People are less willing to use emails for quick-fire conversations (as opposed to correspondence) than in the old days - Tristan"

Quick fire questions aren't part of my lifestyle. I don't plan to sit at my keyboard all day patiently waiting for an essential urgent question to turn up. I pick up text messages on my phone when I leave the house as there is no adequate signal hereabouts. When my bank says it is sending a 'second verification passcode', it's usually arrived by the time I have got out into the garden to stand in the 'sweet spot' to receive it.
I'm afraid a mobile phone is a non-essential in my life. I find the buttons too fiddly, don't really understand 80% of the functions and it regularly shoots off apparently to do something of its own volition! I have made/received 17 phone calls since January and received 30 or 40 text messages, mainly passcodes from my bank and Amazon. If it wasn't for the bank, I could quite happily do without the phone!
Please don't interpret this as a Luddite's view of new technology. I simply have very little real need for a mobile telephone. If I didn't want to dig a hole, I wouldn't buy a spade!

Ringing for a specific event is often a good 'hook' on which to catch new recruits. In January/February of this year we offered via our local FB page 'free lessons to anyone who wanted to be able to say that they rang for the Queen's Jubilee'. We attracted 6 new recruits; one quit immediately - 'not what she thought it would be' - one struggled to attend regularly, and we have retained and developed the other three who are plain hunting & covering and about to move on to PB5. We shall probablty repeat the exercise next January inviting them to ring for the coronation.

>we need to start moving forward into WhatsApp and Instagram. - JASON<

So which of these should I use to be sure that I can keep abreast of national & regional ringing topics? I'm afraid that from what I read in the press, both Whatsapp and rather more so, Instagram are badly tainted with inappropriate and pornographic material and I have no wish to become involved with either. Now that my 'Nigerian cousins' have stopped pestering me with details of the wealth allegedly awaiting me, I find emails quicker, safer and simpler to use.

And remember we don't all enjoy the same level of broadband and mobile phone service. My PAYG phone usage is minimal (less than 20 phone calls and around 40-50 text messages this year; no data) as I, like many rural users, I don't have a reliable phone signal outdoors and an almost zero signal indoors. I have no intention of moving house in order to get a stronger signal so that I can keep abreast of what's going on in the outside world!

First, I must be having a 'blank' day - remind what CMO stands for please.

The fundamental issue is that there are too many platforms or communication channels. When email was the dominant channel Ringing Chat & Change Ringers met everyone's basic needs. Then Facebook appeared and the email traffic began to decline. Then individuals began to feel that their needs could be met better if they created What's App groups (and the like) and so the proliferation of local, secondary or specialist groups in a plethora of comm's channels took off leading to the fragmentation of the world of ringers. The result is a massive duplication of channels rendering it completely impossible to be certain that any message will reach all of its intended targets.

I guess the only answer is to create yet one more channel that will attract/embrace everyone - or is that what this forum was intended to do??