Ringing Forums

I am generally not available for weddings and I don't have a cat.

you are entirely safe from the world of meringue couture then :rofl:

In our tower of six, the fee is £20 per rope plus £20 for church funds: we ring in and out. We rarely have weddings, so I give my £20 to the tower fund – if we had two weddings every week I might think differently about that!

you refer to 'church funds' and 'the tower fund'. Are they the same thing?

Not so far as I am aware. There's a separate tower fund for such things as routine maintenance.

Here at St Tudy in Cornwall we charge £100 for the wedding bells and we ring half an hour before and after the service. No part of this payment goes to individual ringers, but it is paid to the PCC Bell Fund for bell maintenance. I consider it is my duty and privilege to ring for any church service without personal payment.

This came up in conversation in the pub after practice last night. X told us that when he started ringing in Devon, he got 10 shillings for a wedding - which covered 5 pints of beer at 1/10. Y noted that the £20 per rope we now get paid covers 4 pints (at just under £4 a pint in our local) and his train fare (which at £3.95 is about the same cost as a pint).

Of course the cost of beer varies, but does this suggest that 'the cost of 5 pints of beer' is a useful place to start one's calculation?

I play in a 5 or 10 piece band who play for weddings. We have about 20 years experience each, a good range of music for all styles (providing it's brassy!) and will take an afternoon out to entertain you. We charge £2,500 for 2x 45minutes set for the 10 piece and £1,250 for the 5 piece although we also have a mates rate where we only seek to cover expenses. Of the 2.5k, £200 goes to each of us and the rest in the kitty. Like ringers we have to rehearse and play at a professional standard on the day, we have expenses to get there, we have time given, unlike ringers we have to purchase and maintain our own instruments and buy music. While I am not suggesting ringers start charging these professional fees, we should consider ourselves musicians in the same way an organist or choir does and charge accordingly. The three towers I look after charge between £250 (£25 per rope x8) and £275 (£40 x5 plus raising fee), both for ringing after for 25 minutes. I think this is the minimum fair fee.

When I first began to ring in the 1950s our ringers received 7 shillings & 6 pence (37½p) for ringing before & after a wedding. I was told it was set 'a long time ago' when it was the equivalent of a day's wage for a working man. We now charge £100 for ringing after the service and we pay out £10 per rope; the surplus goes into the tower fund.
Checking with an online monetary value comparator the original 37½p is equivalent to £10.47 so we have almost exactly kept pace with the changing value of money.

£10 doesn't sound like a day's wage today.
If it's any interest, in the early 60s where I rang we got 2/6 (before and after) and where I ring now we get £20 (after).

Most towers in London offer £20 a rope in order to get a band to ring out for a wedding. In the City of London it is often £30, more if it is ringing in and out.
This generally means that people choose to ring for the weddings available and don’t feel put out about giving their time (and more than cover their costs for travel).

Yes, quite so. I believe the original rate of 7s. 6d was set way back before the 2nd World War. There are lots of variables in the comparator table; the £10.47 is the equivalent of the 7/6 but comparing labour rates produces figures ranging from around £26 to almost £50 which might be closer to a days wage for 'a working man' today.