Ringing Forums

Our parish changed the service times and neglected to inform us, and low numbers post pandemic preventing Sunday service ringing was not commented on by the vicar... I suppose its changing priorities. Clustering is definitely the way forward for keeping ringing going on Sundays at churches which want it (which do not always correlate with the towers with a resident band).

For members at the smallest end, we are paying over four times more per head than the larger societies, and we have fixed costs too.

As for "what are we getting for our money", you can't have an effective Central Council without a suitable budget, and I don't think everyone is happy to pay for said effective council.

I think one of the issues is the lack of 'involved' people. The 88 report states concerns about the number of teachers and steeplekeepers, and a lack of vibrancy at guild level. Certainly at my tower, one person is all three and is the only one who can do all of those things. It'd be interesting to see the bus factor for each critical role in towers and guilds - I know in our area, this dedicated individual getting run over by the bus could cause a chain reaction locally and result in a number of towers falling silent.

On overall numbers, a proposal is being put to the CC meeting in September to move CC affiliation fees to being based on the number of members rather than the number of Reps. Under the current Rules associations have justified their number of Representatives based on declared membership numbers, and whilst it's very unlikely that numbers are exaggerated just to get an extra Rep, there has been no motivation either to be absolutely certain the number is right. Moving to a model which has a direct link between number of members and cost (albeit not a particularly high cost) is likely to lead to much tighter scrutiny by societies of how many members they actually have. — Simon Linford

Sounds interesting - what sort of cost per member is being looked at?

I am increasingly of the opinion that some sort of census of ringers is required. No-one knows how many active ringers we have, their standard, if they can/do teach, and how often they visit each tower. Association/guild membership numbers seem to mean nothing now, with people not being active, not bothering with membership, or being double-counted by being a member of multiple guilds.

My worry is that we are overlooking areas where ringing is on the edge. The critical mass of ringers is faltering in some of the major cities even, and it's getting to the point where we don't have the handling instructors to take advantage of many of the recruitment opportunities which present themselves. Progression routes are minimal - there are call-changes towers and the elite towers, and increasingly little in-between.

The current layered system is overly-bureaucratic, and I'm really not convinced that the officers needed to run them are the best use of the increasingly-limited number of people willing to take on a leadership role.

A very sobering read; even more so given that so much of what that series discusses is still a problem now.