Ringing Forums

Does this mark the end of direct membership being seen as the way of increasing the funding of ringing (although that is not the only reason for considering a direct membership organisation) — Simon Linford

RW 19July2024 p661 Letters to the Editor Central Council Finances: ...As regards a Direct Membership Organisation, this is easy to say but in fact not so easy to do. We’ve looked at different models but as yet haven’t come up with anything that works without starting from scratch. We’d welcome any ideas to accomplish this without sidelining Guilds & Associations. — FERGUS STRACEY Treasurer of the Central Council

The Council has already made some small steps, and the challenge is to continue along the Direct Membership path, as FergusS suggests, with the full support of Guilds & Associations.

Each annual £1 paid in affiliation fees will now relate to exactly one individual ringer. And in emphasis of this individual relationship, Guilds which charge some or all of their members less than £1, should be allowed to exclude them from their membership count. This may require a change, or revised interpretation, to Council Standing Orders.

At the same time Guilds should be authorised to exclude from their membership count all of their members who specifically choose to opt out of the Council subscription.

As a further change, all those who see their best ringing interests to be represented at the Council by a different affiliated Society, of which they are a member, should (firstly) be encouraged to opt out and, as another change, be specifically asked to choose through which of their memberships they should be affiliated to the Council. This will relate the affiliation to the Council to exactly those individual ringers who choose to be affiliated. It will eliminate double-counting of ringers, and help Council members in knowing whom they are representing: the number of representative members would also be reduced.

As a final change, the annual affiliation letter from Guild Secretaries could include the names and basic details of all those contributing to the Council - and allowing those who wish to remain anonymous to do so ...

Here is a thought experiment, based on a recent invitation from a local tower for Elaine and I to join them to ring for a wedding. It was a half-hour drive each way, with twenty-minutes ringing each side of a half-hour ceremony. It was a pleasure to help-out; we enjoyed the ringing, and they kindly gave us fifty pounds...

By way of background, we have led groups seeking to improve their practical ringing at residential (and other) courses, we teach bell-handling as a favourite ringing activity, and also teaching-teachers to teach bell-handling; we do remedial style-clinics; we do lectures in ringing-theory and method learning, and there's ten years' experience of tower-captaincy (as well as the secretarial role, managing a successful rehanging project, teaching handbells and how they can help method-learning in tower) ...

With that collective CV we could apply to tutor ...

A Course in Band Development for (a hypothetical) struggling local band, which will benefit on successful completion with ...

• two or more competent teachers of bell-handling
• a collective commitment to one another and to lifelong (ringing) learning
• structured and predictable future practices ...
• ... aimed at continuing-improvement of Sunday ringing perfrormances
• ...

which would run for a term of ten weeks, two hours per session instead of the normal practice, with ten band members and two tutors, at a average cost-per-student of £10 per session (£1,000 in total).

To meet the wide ambition of Ringing2030, the CCCBR could project-manage the course design and aim for a hundred courses per Autumn-term for each of the three years leading to 2030. That would be worth paying an new employed project-manager to do ...

Discuss :-)

Why is it proposed to spend £8,000 of the 'limited' CCCBR funds...on the Carter ringing machine in 2026? [and another £1,000 in 2024-25]... Why is that a priority [compared with] new ringers? ... I accept the machine is unique, complicated & should be cared for. Could any increased costs re the Carter Machine be funded from Lottery grants? — Ken Webb

Yes, not the core function of the Central Council, and does not seem to contribute to the ambition for Ringing2030.

With modern communications we ought to be able to recruit supporters who can bring resources to maintain/publicise the machine. If not, then find a high shelf somewhere, so that it can be revived when interest and new supporters are available.

[160 life members, 10.8% of membership of 1489] is a lot of free memberships. It means YACR is losing £1920 per annum in subs already, and I assume the membership is getting older so the subscription income will reduce further in future. — John Harrison

Yes, it reflects the age-profile of YACR, and other territorial societies, which takes us full-circle to why we (CCCBR) need to be doing something about it, and hence the 2030-initiative and the need for ringers to contribute the £1/year.

We (YACR) discussed ending our free-life-member concession. I made the debating-point that we would all become living ex-LifeMembers. Also that having contributed thirty consecutive annual-subscriptions, we had done-our-bit, and that age and infirmity might soon reduce active ringing, and it was desirable to maintain the membership-connection even if active participation was in decline.

We don't think of £1920 as 'lost', but an incentive to recruitment of new, younger ringers to maintain the subscription-income. As discussed elsewhere new ringers now join the Association on the same basis as other Resident ringers rather than paying-the-same but having the title 'Associate'

... CCCBR cashflow statement ... appears to assume the £24,000 cost of running the SW training course in 2025 is funded solely by the CCCBR although the cashflow note (ix) states the whole £24,000 should be self-financing - so should not reduce CCCBR funds. — Ken Webb

This was discussed at the first consultation meeting on 30Jun: it was suggested that the information be presented in a revised form. Currently it's awry for lots of reasons:

Firstly, the document is to help a decision about future subscriptions: it is not a regulatory end-of-year accounting document with contingent liabilities that needs to withstand picking-apart by the taxman ...

Secondly, even if it were, we would best ask our professional accounting-support (whoever that is) to make their professional judgement on the correct provision for the accounts: for example if we were guarantor for three parallel courses ...

Thirdly, in any case, why might we bet-the-farm on an event for the benefit of, say, thirty students when our overall ambition for Ringing2030 is so much wider? Residential courses are brilliant events in themselves: they need to be organised in a way that limits the overall liabilities to their organisers...

Rule- (or law-) making is hard to get right, and there are few ringers wishing to contribute to the process. There are a few more who wish to explore the boundaries, to test whether the overall effect is consistent / helpful / silly.

The proportion of [silly] cases is so tiny it has no material effect on the cost of supporting them. — John Harrison

. ... but the cost of validating the process (was the naming-Performance true?), adding methods to the database, and (future generations) wondering "why?" - all adds to a non-zero cost in time and effort...

Maybe each new Methods should require ten quid towards Central Council expenses. ??

... figure [10792 Minimus extents] from the article on the web by Polster & Ross — John Harrison

Yes, thay have the same count (website dated 1Dec2009) as from my 1990-dated computer program. I had the number written in my Ringers' Diary for many years and was reassured by another independent analysis referenced in a Ringing Theory discussion in 2004.

A lot of those Hamiltonian paths are likely to be not asymmetric single lead methods... — John Harrison

Yes, having blown the cobwebs off my 1990-printout, I had the same classification of them as AlexanderHolroyd used in 2004 here

If rotations, reversals and mirror images are discounted, the number drops to 162 — Holroyd

Of those 162, there are 75 one-part extents with no symmetry, hence 7200 of the 10792 have four separate blue lines (example as above Crossbank Minimus): and of those, 288 do have a hunt bell.

I enjoyed the Ringing Shapes, thanks

Minimus ringers ran out of new methods to ring for which a single extent was possible. — Graham John

They may have run out of methods that to which they were allowed to give a name :angry:, but ...

(from a dusty folder of computery dated 1990 ...), there are over ten thousand (10,792) different Minimus extents, in which the twentyfour rows are connect by the traditional changes (x 12 14 34). Some are familiar - Plain Bob Minimus for example, and its reverse Reverse Bob Minimus, while both place notations can be rotated for any of the other three bells to be in the hunt; there are 10,784 more to find, and they are all summarised on this Join-The-Dots diagram:

For an example set of extents, draw a circuit which visits each of the twenty-four nodes (blobs) exactly once: each node uses one of its four connecting lines on the way in, and a different one on the way out. To convert to place notation, follow the circuit from any node, interpreting each double-line as X; each thin line as 14; each thick line as 12 and each dotted line as 34. In most cases that will give twentyfour different extents by rotation (starting at a different node in the diagram). There are another twentyfour by traversing the circuit in the opposite direction. By swapping the interpretations of the thick and dotted lines (swapping the 34s with the 12s - in ringing terms, the Reverse methods), gives another fortyeight extents for a total of ninetysix.

For a completed example ciruit click and starting from the top node with the blue line (colours for clarity only) gives the place notation
x14x14.12x12.14x12x14.34x34.14x14x34x14x34 Crossbank Minimus
which we rang and named here, for fun. Ringing the place notation backwards and rotating would give Bankcross Minimus and their reverses are Reverse Crossbank Minimus and Reverse Bankcross Minimus

Sadly I could carry on with the relationship of circuits to extents and counts of both, the history of method naming and its rules, method symmetry, their reversals and ringing them backwards ...

...Think from a practical perspective: "Go Great Massingham"... — John Harrison

Yes, quite so. Conductors and their bands need to know what they are ringing before they start, and which calls there are likely to be. For example, in my experience, handbell performances are usually up-down-and-off without anyone saying "Go".

My point is different to that (lots of head-of-pin-dancing, maybe, but lots of ringing is like that) :-)

Framework for Method Ringing ... provides the tools to describe what people choose to ring, rather than to determine that some things are legitimate, and by implication others are not. — ibid

The Framework is indeed permissive and wide-ranging in defining what a ringing Performance can contain...
... while still defining restrictive rules about how methods may be named and added to the
Methods Library.

An innovative idea in a Performance is something we all support/encourage...

There is indeed nothing wrong with ringing it, so if someone does ring it how should they describe it? — ibid

but there some new methods which are impossible to use the Methods Library to describe. ...

... hence my earlier suggestion that a list of the rows does at least give a definitive account of what was rung.

I'll do some examples ... later ... :-)

But which could you remember a month later? — Graham John

I would probably need both, so that when the tower captain says "Catch hold for this brilliant new method I've found - Great Massingham Treble Place Minimus", then I could work out the line from the place notation ...

Hmmmm, both events are, imho, unlikely. I might do better converting the place notation to some practical ringing with a pair-of-handbells ...

The aim of the Framework, or any naming system, is to enable more compact description without loss of accuracy. — John Harrison

The most compact description of the ringing would seem to be within the performance report
-1234-1234-14.34.14-1234-12,34 (30 characters)

compared with
Great Massingham Treble Place Minimus (37 characters)
:-)

...so if someone does ring it how should they describe it? — John Harrison

With Bellboard and a laptop, they could just provide a list of the rows that were rung.

It's not a new problem, of course. Organising tours fifty years ago, usually for visits from a canal boat, needed a first-draft timetable of towers within walking distance of the canal, then a visit to the library to consult Crockford's (Clerical directory) for the name and address of the vicar, then a polite handwritten letter enclosing a stamped-addressed envelope. It was usually an efficient system. I remember replanning one day to cope with a non-existent response, and two months later receiving a reply from South Africa to where the vicar had retired a couple of years before. Amendment to system: add "or incumbent" to the vicar's name on the envelope ...

Another efficient system was to telephone the tower contact mentioned in the Guild report, avoiding practice night for the call: that gave an good indication on whether the request would be looked-on favourably, and then promising to call-back a week later when all the necessary people had been consulted. If the tower-contact had changed, then there was probably a warm trail to the current officer. I suspect this system of speaking-with-real-people, rather than messaging them, is still the best bet ...

... but if we want to make the best of smartphones I suspect that WhatsApp is the best modern method, with integrated textmessages, photos of participants and voice calls.

Otoh, we recently had a Tower Correspondent who declined to have their postal or email address or landline or mobile number published anywhere, for fear of online nastiness ... Hmmmm ....

The force required to pull off (any) bell is determined by the steeplekeeper, and their positioning of the end-stops on the slider's track and hence where the slider hits them. Many tracks are the same effective length as they were when delivered by the bellfounders, and could be improved with some small blocks of wood and a few nails.

Too lightly set, and the bell may accidentally be pulled off, and need more pulling-accuracy to stand. Too heavily set and only hefty ringers will try ringing the bell. Leaving a heavily-set bell up can bend the stay and make it even harder to pull off. ...

Useful articles in Tower Handbook

Two of my new ringers attended the recent NW course. Both were working at the same level but they were split into different groups with different tutors .... — Peter Sotheran

which is good, because one benefit of the course is to ring with new people...

...One has returned with renewed confidence and a sense of achievement. ...

which is also good,

...The other is disappointed and somewhat unsettled. ...

... which is a pity. After the course, there's an opportunity to provide feedback to the organisers, and it would be useful to debate what they wrote, if they care to share their thoughts with us here. Even better is to use the opportunities for feedback during the couse. For example, there was a hour on each of the four days, in a large meeting room together, for all the students and tutors on the Learn It, Ring It topic to informally exchange ideas, compare progress and to prepare for the forthcoming practical sessions.

...Both tutors required an acceptable standard of bell handling and striking....

which is also good, and one of the aims of the course. The course emphasis was basic skills, rather than specifically 'Plain Hunt' or 'Plain Bob' in order to tailor the sessions to the needs of each student individually.

...One [tutor] was willing to compromise somewhat in order that the pupils could make progress with PH and PB. The other appears to have insisted in perfection before moving to the next stage.

Well, I don't think we ought to turn perfection into a perjorative term, but neither of us was there to view the interactions and the progress over the four days.

A few thoughts, then:
Having attended weekend courses for thirty years as tutor or helper, students' expectations of achieving, say, a touch of PBDoubles inside, is affected by all manner of variables - the long draft, unfamiliar weight of bells, lengths of rope, size of circle, lighting, being young and having blasted ahead to achieve this at home between course application and the course weekend, ... Hence the less-specific course-topic title Learn It, Ring It allows tutors and students to review together all progress and challenges, and finish the course concentrating on the individual positive outcomes.

One of our Learn It, Ring It students was doing well in rounds on a long draft with an excellent long straight pull. The hand-transfer looked good: while the hand was in the correct position it was not gripping the rope until well-after the hand was above head-high on the tensioned backstroke, so there was no chance of adjusting the rope-length for a change of hunting-speed, such as a dodge. We suggested working on this when ringing-easily and without pressure, and that they would find it a worthwhile investment of concentration. Hopefully this was a useful outcome for this student, even without having listed it before the course, or to have achieved this completely during the weekend

neat trick ... is to pull off the handstroke, do the hand transfer and then take the left hand away, so the backstroke is only done with the right hand. — Simon Linford

I tried that this morning, and it's really hard. I need more practice to add it to other party-tricks (one-handed-ringing, wrong-handed ringing down, dropping the backstroke each stroke, the £x-note, etc). The hard bit for me was when to reunite the left hand with the rope: just ringing both strokes right-handed is easier, but presumably not the point of the exercise.

Early exercise is: learner pulls-off first handstroke, and then just does backstrokes while teacher catches other handstrokes: this (let-go with left hand) might work as a reinforcement to the hand-transfer, with the teacher standing the next handstroke and repeating the whole process ...

Even-earlier exercise is: learner pulls-off with dummy tailend, completes hand-transfer while teacher does everything else and stands. Learner letting-go with left hand might work as reinforcement, with less effect on the moving bell.

..one can always revert to asking WWJD... — John Harrison

What Would John Do ?? :-)

Organise your own peals

We had a local ringer, he died some years ago, and he was a proficient tenor-behind ringer. He would attend our local practice and ask if the winter slot was available for a peal; it was a hesitant 'yes' in anticipation of the next question: ”can you find the band with a good conductor and I'll ring the tenor behind”.

So it can work as a peal-organising strategy ...

Yes, it's the difference between pulling and checking, and to quote an Authoratitive Source :-) :

What is the difference between pulling and checking?
This is one of the most important questions in ringing. You must know when to do which, and train your arms to be able to do one without the other.
- Pulling is applying force as the rope comes down. It makes the bell swing higher and more slowly.
- Checking is the opposite, ie applying force as the rope rises. It makes the bell swing less high and more quickly.

If you pull when you ought to check, or vice versa, you will make the problem worse. If you pull and check all the time, you will rapidly tire yourself but still not be able to control the bell very well.
Separating pulling from checking means you must be able to turn on or turn off the force in your arms between the rope rising and falling. This takes some practice, especially when you want to exert more effort. It is easier just to heave for the whole way up and down, but you must resist the temptation. — The Tower Handbook 13.1d

and the advice applies when the bell is almost-up as well as when ringing full-circle.

I have been scribbling a diagram on our whiteboard to help explain all this. I haven't found a similar diagram published? Have I missed one anywhere?



Ideally it's intended to show

• Check will advance the Bong: Pull has nil/minimal effect on the current stroke (yet to be heard) and influences the next stroke
• Absence of Check may allow more Float, and so a delay to the Bong
• The squiggly-bit between strokes is when there is no effective rope tension and the bell is doing its own thing.
• There are other bells slightly out-of-phase with ours, causing bongs between ours ...
• ... and if we can superimpose their pull-cycle on the diagram, we can show where the conductor says "Three to Four" and what effect this ought to have on Checking Floating and Pulling, and on the order of the bells' Bongs, and why the tradition is "two blows' warning"

We teach ringing up first, before the learner can ring. This gives them a feel for the bell and managing the rope ... they must know how to take coils and manage the bell safely — Phillip George

The main learner-outcomes from one of my first-sessions:

• Enthusiasm to return for another session
• tell the family it's "More Complicated Than It Looks" ...
• Nothing Scary happened
• How a Bell Works ... understanding of Scary Things That We Will Avoid ...
• Working 1to1 with teacher feels safe, relaxing, and will need approx another [n] sessions ...
• ... (etc)

Learner will have repeated ringing a backstroke maybe fifty to a hundred times, a dozen or two pulling-off at handstroke, and at least a dozen

• pull-off the handstroke
• successful hand-transfer
• backstrokes-only for a few more pulls

Ringing-up requires lots of different interactions with the rope, is not easily reproducible, and is less likely to have the learner leave with an understanding of the essential arms-moving-up-and-down repeatability of ringing strokes.

I introduce lowering without making coils at the end of the first lesson, ... I look after the sally — Phil Gay

Yes I do this with learners doing well, also as an example of explaining the process while they are doing backstrokes, and testing if they can listen-and-understand while ringing, and then do as suggested ...

I have always taught learners to release the last coil when raising a bell by gripping with the fingers and opening the thumb,... — Richard Pargeter

Releasing the coil in the way described already is essential if slack rope is to be avoided — Phil Gay

Yes: it needs to be laid across the hand properly before starting, and just releasing the thumb-grip at the desired moment.

I struggled to learn to ring up, ... the longer I spent trying to get the flippin' bell up ... the more conscious I became of the rest of the band waiting to start their practice,...I [now] realise the rest of the band were completely ... empathetic — Steve Pilfold

... and were all nodding their heads as you were pulling, in the hope that this energy somehow transferred to just-a-little-more pull :-)