Ringing Forums

Where was that talk?

Phil Ramsbottom, current St Martin's Guild RM, is a passionate advocate of Bob Doubles being the wrong place to start - he has been commissioned to write a book about alternative routes.

At my tower, Moseley, I am finding closed handstroke lead Devon style call changes is good for developing bell handling beyond the "unlikely to kill yourself stage". It's surprisingly hard but rewarding when you get it right. I want to start every session with it - first six people in.

The difficulty is where you draw the line on calling for and even organising mass ringing. In particular we get regular charity requests asking for bells to be rung to support a certain thing - sometimes they look as though they would attract a lot of support and sometimes less so. They can be passed onto the ringing community to form a judgement and agree locally.

Ukraine is a tricky one because coordinated ringing probably would be appreciated and supported although the Church has not called for it. Although we didn't call for ringing in support of the people of Syria, or various other conflicts of similar magnitude so again there is a judgement to be made.

Always will to listen to opinions of course

And yes, I'll start a new thread per blog - that's a good idea

Latest blog has just been published here

That's excellent Mike (and thanks Alison for the link). The houses at Belper are much nearer to where this proposed tower is.

I think between all those comments and a couple of things I have been sent privately I have all the defence I need at this stage.

This is for a proposed tower at the entrance to a public park in Birmingham which we are calling "The Pyramid Stage". It is on the main A38 running into Northfield and although we all think you will not hear bells over ambient trafic noise we don't want negative reactions from nearby residents to a current consultation being run by the Council, so I want to give some reassurance on dB.
https://stmartinsguild.org/teaching/birmingham-university-of-bell-ringing/

David Kirkcaldy visited Nottingham last week and is in the process of negotiating breakfast cost - so not long

I was very impressed by the use of a training bell at Abbots Bromley when I visited a few weeks ago. It is a Higby version sitting in the clock room and rung in the corner of the ringing chamber, with the ringer watching Abel on screen. It was used before and throughout the evening practice with a young recruit perfecting his handling and plain hunt, and then various other people during the practice were using it to ring other things. It was in constant use.
I went to see it because I am installing one in my home tower.

True. 'Better' might not be the right word but I know what you mean. It is certainly true that in the Black Zone's upper reaches, provided you live in the right place and have the abillty, the things being rung a much more complex than they were say 20 years ago. It is far easier to get up a ladder if there are more people above you to help pull you up.

Ringing and striking gets better and better the more complicated you make things. So it is next to impossible to scale the higher reaches if your striking is not very good - you just won't get asked. Is that important in a wider context? Only in as much as generally ringers do prefer ringing to be good - I am sure of that. If you have ringers, or a band, who do not care about the striking, then more experienced ringers will be less inclined to help them, and so there is a downward spiral of the quality of ringing.

However that does lead to a conflict of putting pressure on ringers to 'perform' when that might not be what they signed up for. We get into this whole question of whether ringing is a Performing Art, just a hobby, or something in between.

Latest blog is here https://cccbr.org.uk/2022/03/01/presidents-blog-54/

The future of ringing, or the future of change ringing (and the development thereof)? I think they have different solutions.

I will drop David Kirkcaldy and email and note your interest.

Nick, I am not sure that is completely true, for reasons I hypothesised when I wrote the 'Ringing Zone' articles many years ago. There are barriers beyond Bob Minor which are quite difficult to overcome, but I think a lot more is done now to understand and introduce stepping stones even since I wrote those articles. However I think there are enough examples of people who have struggled at some point to overcome a barrier but then gone much further to show that it is worth investing resources in people who are keen to learn.

Looks like about 1983 then. Just about before my time ;-)

I am not sure that many vicars/PCCs realise the tower captain or ringing master is actually appointed by them.
Alison this is also something the Guild of Clerical Ringers can put in their forthcoming publication for clergy.

Yes that's ls also a consideration. I really meant on economic room and facilities hire.

Latest blog is here https://cccbr.org.uk/2022/02/16/presidents-blog-53/

It is an unfortunate consequence of using the sorts of conference venues which are within the CC's budget, e.g. modern university campuses

Do you think it will be the case that more and more towers will have maintenance agreements with bellhangers? Not necesssarily a bad thing.

I remember my early peals of it at Birmingham Cathedral when Liz Bowden was a regular visitor and just before we started she would always ask "are we ringing 10 courses" much to our amusement. But it was a serious question left over from when it was clearly the norm.

Experience at St Martin's in the Bull Ring is a case in point. Traditional Tuesday night practice, albeit only every other week, which was suspended for lockdown. Then when we came out of lockdown we find that the church has been unable to resist a financial offer from a choir to use the church to practice on a Tuesday evening so we cannot start ringing until 8.30 (which we did in fact on Tuesday which is quite late to start a quarter of Bristol Maximus!). Up against paying uses ringing is not going to compete.

When we were working on the plans for a ringing centre at St John's Hanley, being an owner of the building I looked at what the ringers would need to be charged for a lease of the tower and it was going to be a minimum of £2000 a year. There wasn't really a business plan for the ringing centre that could pay for the space it used - it could only really cover maintence of the hardware plus operational costs such as heat light and power.