Ringing Forums

thanks for the information which agrees with what I believe the most important factors are. My own progress has been much slower, primarily because of lack of opportunity - my first QP inside took nearly 4 years, although I'd covered or trebled to 8 other QPs before then. However none of those were in my home tower, in fact I still haven't rung a QP there after ringing for 8 years and suspect I never will, unless it's with a visiting band.

Not surprisingly, it sounds like London has a decent pool of method ringers. The ringing in the towers in my vicinity is mostly CCs & PH on 6 with occasional Plain Minor methods, but that requires ringers from several towers. Anything beyond that requires significant travelling, so you need to be motivated to keep moving on.

I think other issues are assumptions about what order things must be learned and how quickly that can be done. I spend a fair amount time doing my homework and practising on the tower sim but it's rather dispiriting when you realise that you are going to be required to pound away at PB8 for 6 months before you are allowed to have a crack at Surprise Major, in reality it took around 3 weeks of fairly concentrated practice on the sim to go from Cambridge Minor to Major and ring it at a branch practice. In some instances, low expectations are as much of a barrier as lack of opportunities.

It also results in what some residential courses complain about - the same students coming back and doing the same thing year after year (as they can ring whatever it is ONLY when surrounded by good ringers ( i.e. the helpers). — David Smith

I don't doubt that's true but the more important questions is why? From watching @Simon Linford's Ringing 2030 presentation, his estimate is that branches may now only have around 20 Surprise Level ringers, although obviously the levels before that will have more ringers. It's very difficult to learn to ring methods unless you are surrounded by a good band, and it takes quite a bit of practice beyond that before you can do it with others who are wobbly. Courses are probably the only opportunity some people have to ring with good ringers, but once a year is never going to be enough for them to learn to ring them. That's a grass-roots problem that no number of residential courses is ever going to solve.

you have to be very dedicated, and it takes a big investment of time both inside the tower and with learning methods in your own time — Charlotte Boyce

If you want to (say) ring Surprise Major then yes, all those things are true. But not everyone aspires to that level, certainly not from the start. Just the fact that people want to move on at all is to be welcomed, even if that's "only" from CCs to ringing inside to touches of PB. So another useful question would be "What level of ringing would you be happy to reach?".

I think the questions about learning opportunities need to considered in terms of practicality. For example I'd like to be learning to ring Surprise Major every week with a rock solid band - there's only one problem - there are none round here.

I think the most important factor in making continued progress is weekly access to support at the appropriate level. I feel there's too much emphasis on branch practices as being good learning opportunities (they aren't, for a whole host of reasons) or longer ringing courses, which whilst high-profile, don't deliver sustained progress and frankly are mostly a waste of time.

It's the grass roots that needs most attention, that needs to be regular and sustained over years. That's a far harder task, so unsurprisingly doesn't generally happen.

We were really pleased with this statistic. It shows that there is considerable energy in the exercise which is one thing we'll need in abundance to ensure the continuation of the art. — Tristan Lockheart

My home tower has been CCs & wonky PH for at least the last 40 years. It's basically the same pool of ringers as before, but the band are now taking their first steps into method ringing. It may only have been Minimus + cover, but last night we rang 2 methods back-to back, and the buzz people got from it was heart warming to see. Obviously we need to look after the people heading towards the ringing pinnacles, but it's also important to look after those in the valleys as well - after all, there are more of us down here! :wink: I think it's good to remember that enjoyment and a sense of achievement usually depends more on a sense of making progress than it does on technical difficulty. As the saying goes, the journey is more important than the destination.

From what I see, involved with district practices and district training events, older learners can learn just as successfully as younger learners if they want to, have the time for it and enjoy it (and if the opportunities to learn and practice, including talking about how to learn, what to look for or listen for whilst ringing, etc are provided). — Lucy Chandhial

I think that's right, but as an older starter myself I could obviously be biased :smile:. Of all of the people who I know who started with or after me, I'm the one who has got the furthest, but then again, I've put the most time and effort in. I do wonder if the importance of age is often overstated, and that the level of aptitude, opportunities, support and just plain old time on the end of a rope are more important factors?

"Munchausen" seems to be available as a method name...

Nice work.

No huge surprises I think, but I found the "How old you are when you start matters…" slide particularly interesting, as a late starter myself. It would be interesting to try to drill down as to why that's the case. For example, is it:

• The younger you are the quicker you learn and the further you get.
• It just takes a long time to become an advanced ringer, if you start late it's too late.
• Older starters just don't have the mental / physical capacity for it.
• There's an assumption that older starters won't amount to much and therefore appropriate teaching / mentoring is not offered.
• The advanced ringers are the ones who started early, had an aptitude and stuck at it, the less able dropped out, so there's selection bias going on.

I'm sure there are others as well, and it's going to be a combination of factors rather than just one.

There wasn't a detailed breakdown of how old people were when they started, other than the majority (57%) of current ringers started when they were over 21, and I suspect the average start age has moved up over the last decade or so.

83% of ringers want to improve their ringing, which obviously includes older ones. Whilst there's an understandable focus on youth opportunities I don't think older ringers should be forgotten, as at the moment they are the backbone of most towers, and will be for some considerable time, even if youth recruitment is successful.

"we" could only ring Plain Bob, Kent, Double Norwich, and maybe Cambridge 8.

"Only". Your starting point is way beyond many of the bands round here.

I can ring touches of Cambridge, I still class myself as a learner.

People tend to learn PB by bell number, the same way they learn PH, so bobs & singles are a big challenge. The average fare of 2 plain courses of PB5 a week = 4 dodges = a glacial pace of learning, As I remember, I decided to teach myself Double Oxford on the tower sim (easy to remember, lots of dodging), Treble Bob Hunt, then Oxford TB. But I've seen much more thought-through suggestions than that - on the St Martin's Guild website, perhaps?

I don't want to focus on my case as the important discussion is the more general one and I'm not the future of ringing here as I'm too old. But as you asked, first I learned how to learn methods properly, not by rote - there are good books on this but it does require being prepared to learn some theory. Then I went from PB to Cambridge on our tower sim, not in one jump but via a number of other methods, and during COVID. I'm the wrong side of 60, there was no ringing taking place so no band.

As for Cambridge 8, the challenge is finding a band who can ring it and who will let me ring it with them - but I do have a plan :wink:

I've heard the "arrange a practice" suggestion before, and whilst on the surface it seems like a solution, it really isn't. It doesn't scale up for everyone who needs helping, and as I already noted, there's no longer a big enough pool of ringers in this area to draw on to start with. And even if there was, fixing my problem wouldn't fix the much larger problem.

Yes organisation is an issue, but from what I've been told that's been the case here since well before I started ringing. Once the number of experienced and willing ringers drops below a critical threshold, no amount of "organising" can dig you out of the hole. Trying what may have sort-of worked in the past over and over again in the hope it might fix the current crisis is futile, a radically different approach is needed.

I think what you are seeing with your sim practices is the ever widening chasm between "ground floor" ringers and the "surprisers". It's a huge step from PB5 to Camb6/8, not helped by the piss-poor nature of PB as a teaching method compounded by the "by rote" way it is taught. Learning how to learn and how to ring "proper" methods pretty much means starting over for most people, which after endless PB, few have the stomach for. PB nearly finished my ringing career and I had to learn Camb6 (and now 8) unassisted on a tower sim - and it's going to be a challenge to get a chance to ring it "for real" on 8.

"harsh" might imply that it's not true, "direct" or "blunt" might be nearer to the mark :wink: The original observation was @Simon Linford's not mine - but from my experience he is spot on.

The only regular intermediate/advanced branch-style practice I'm aware of in the GM area has nothing to do with a branch, it's been organised by one individual. It seems to be primarily for people who can already ring at Surprise level, which I think is a measure of the scale of the problem - even people at that level are having to arrange special practices in order to get a ring.

Association level practices are mostly a wash, the closest towers to here are in 3 different associations and none of them are great - but from talking to people who were ringing here decades ago, it's never exactly been a hotbed of ringing.

I fully agree that you need "experienced ringers being willing to invest time to help developing ringers", but in my opinion there just isn't the critical mass here for that any longer - although I'd love someone to prove me wrong!

I hope this area is an outlier, but approaches based on the availability of sufficient experienced ringers to "bootstrap" things are I think probably unworkable here. The challenge is how to re-establish proper method ringing when to all practical intents, it's already died out.

From the blog post:

Seeding more regional ringing courses is in the strategy, but it was a bit concerning to learn that it was the entry level options on the NW course that were most over subscribed, the level that should be being catered for by local branches and associations. The course had tried to pitch itself a little higher up the learning curve.

Colour me utterly unsurprised.

Many associations in the NW seem to struggle to move people past CCs & PH. There's no widespread bedrock of help for the transition from that into methods, so the only option for many is to go on a course. But without ongoing support afterwards, that's pretty pointless. The advanced ringing that does take place is mostly in small, closed, increasingly elderly groups who want to only ring with people at their level and who aren't really interested in teaching.

The current generation are probably the end of method ringing here, other than a few isolated pockets. I think it's already too late to do anything about it, method ringers here have been sleepwalking towards oblivion for decades. If there is to be method ringing here in the future, it's going to mean starting over from scratch. And a once a year course won't cut it.

Amen to that, thank you Simon!

from playing catch up on FB, it seems first the method name was redacted but the performances were left, now that's been reversed and the CC is looking at renaming the method.

I agree that a band of happy and skilful CC ringers is preferable to a struggling band trying to unsuccessfully ring methods, but the culture in most of the country is that method ringing should be the ultimate goal - just look at the ART syllabus, for example. However for both forms you need to be able to strike well which means listening, not just looking. What you ring and how you ring it are related but separate issues.

I agree with every word, and I think it's difficult to overemphasise just how much ringing, at my level at least, is vision dominated. I recollect a long-standing ringer correctly identifying the cause of a PH fire-up, but when asked why they didn't just ring in the right place anyway the reply was "Because if I did, it would all go wrong" :gasp: That's completely wrong but it's unreasonable to blame people for that, or for the poor striking it leads to, because that's what they've been taught from the very start.

The traditional path from CCs to method ringing is that you "just" learn PH, then PB and hey presto, you are a method ringer. The truth is that if you've been taught the traditional way, you have to pretty much start over to learn to ring methods. When I grasped the scale of the challenge I very nearly gave up ringing, and it took around 9 months before I made any externally visible progress as I had to relearn how to ring. I know some ringers breeze through, but many don't and either drop out, or get stuck. Most teaching ignores the difficulty of the transition, and as a learner you have to a) realise it's required b) want to do it enough to put the effort in. As a result of that not happening, towers are full of people who believe they will become method ringers by just doing more of what they've already been taught.

I think we need to be up-front about the challenges of becoming a method ringer, rather than trying to push people on beyond the limits of their interest and/or abilities. If someone insists on trying to ring methods by bell number then I think we need to be truthful and tell them that they are wasting their time, and that they should concentrate on improving their skills at the level they are happy at.

hardly surprising that people fixate in a rope and blindly follow it, they are only doing what they were told to do as soon as they rang with other people. And hardly surprising that as soon as one person is out of place there's instant carnage as the rest of them blindly follow the rope in front. Whilst individual striking skills are clearly important, it's something that needs the whole band working together on.

The way the learning is happening is holding people back. — Martyn Bristow

I think you are completely right.

Currently, most teaching is usually done by the small percentage of people with high natural aptitude and who learned so long ago they can't remember learning. As such, teaching is geared to people who are the same, so learners are asked to jump straight from PH by-the-numbers to PB, and to simultaneously pick up ropesight, ringing by place, remembering a method and dodging. That still works for the small percentage who could always learn that way, but it does not work for people who have the potential to ring at a more advanced level, but who can't get there in one huge bound. It's not as if there aren't lots of resources out there for a more gradual approach, but many ringers are very resistant to change. If we want to increase the numbers of people ringing at a good standard we need to make continued progress more accessible rather than just recruiting more people who don't get much beyond PH.

The other side of the coin is the learners themselves. For some of them, no matter how much it's explained that you can't ring methods using a fixed sequence of bell numbers, they simply won't put in the effort to learn to ring by place. Even if they've claimed to have learned a methods, it is by bell number. Yet there's still "When we ring our first QP..." The blunt truth is that they won't, ever. Trying to push those learners beyond by-bell-number is pointless, and intensely frustrating experience for teachers. Better to accept they've decided to limit their progress and work on improving their skills at that level.

The problem is that graphite paste tends to get everywhere. The surface of our bells have been affected by pollution (mill town), in the past they'd have been black leaded, nowadays to get the same finish bellhangers use blackboard paint, which is what is on ours.

that's exactly what happened to the one above, the slider was ground down to about half it's thickness. I have put a thin layer of hard wax on the new ones (a quick rub with a candle) which doesn't collect any grit, but I'm not sure it made any appreciable difference.

• BBC, from 1952 but I don't seem to be able to hear the audio on it
• Lots of BBC ones here, but no dates

Mind you, I think some of them are best left unlistened to :grimace:

• Seven bells, poorly rung. St. Michael's parish church, Mytholmroyd.
• Church Bells: Outside St. Chad's Parish Church, Rochdale.

stays that are so strong they don't break and defeat the idea that the stay is a 'weakest link' to prevent damage to other parts of the installation — Robin Shipp

Here's an example of what happens if you use a tropical hardwood stay; its continual
pounding on the slider turned it into shredded wheat. And the liberal coating of grease on the runner board when mixed with stone dust from the steeple didn't help either.

I think your first one is going to be hard to top to be honest, I don't know of anyone who wants to cock things up.

Some more suggestions:

• I will not shout, it only makes things even worse
• I will dispense at least as much encouragement and praise as I do criticism
• I will not look down on those who are less accomplished than I am