Ringing Forums

Never understood why there is often no ringing in Holy Week, when we should be advertising the Church's presence as much as possible! We always held our Monday practice as normal, and rang for the Maunday Thursday service as well. We had one vicar who wanted us to ring open before the Good Friday service, as he was annoyed that all the shops were open as normal. We quite often rang fully muffled. Although the bells were not as loud, they were perfectly audible, they just sounded slightly different -softer. I can see no problem ringing for a funeral that week. It is unlikey to be on the Friday or Thursday even.

When will we know how much the accommodation will cost?

But the rooms at the Greenwich meeting were at least as expensive as some hotels have been.

It's a pity that again there are only single rooms available at the AGM headquarters.

No, because Pealbase only goes back at the moment to 1924, and does not show full details. You can't really search by tower, only by ringer.

I know there is a cumulative index from 1911, but I usually am looking for peals or ringers in peals, and this is not covered in the index.

Yes, but I am talking about very old Ringing Worlds, 1960s and older.

Might it be helpful to have that on the Online Publications part of the website?

It's not easy to search the Ringing World either - I find it quite often fails to find things

This is one of the scanned reports

I have also scanned many of my Asscociation's reports - up to 1990. At my last place of work I had access to a very good photocopier/scanner. Many of the older reports (pre 1960) were stapled together and the staple had rusted, so I removed the staple and took them apart to scan. I also photocopied them, and as the page were sparate, I was able, after a bit of trial and error, to do back-to back copies so I was able to produce facsimile copies which looked almost identical to the real thing, as I wanted to have physical copies of each report as well as online ones. The scanned ones are in a drop-box file as PDFs. It took me about 15 minutes per report for the older , shorter ones. They are starting to get longer so the next few will take a bit more time, but it's not a huge job. We now need to decide how they are going to be made available online. Co-incidentally, the H&A workgroup discussed this recently, and I have nearly finished an article for the RW on this subject .
I agree about minutes etc. I recently wanted to check our AGM minutes from 1990. They seem to have disappeared. Some have been sent to the county archive and others seem still to be with former General Secretaries. It's not exactly ideal. Unfortunately our Association library was disbanded many years ago.

None of the practices/service ringing I go to ask ringers to wear masks. Usually large ringing rooms with ventillation. Only 1 or 2 ringers wear them for quarters, and no-one I ring with wears one for a peal. I don't actually go to any towers who insist on wearing a mask because I can't ring in one for more than a few minutes.

When the guidance was first relaxed, there was a sentence saying that if you were undertaking a physical activity and felt that wearing a mask would make this difficult, this could be claimed as an exemption but I can't find this any more. Is it no longer the case? Several churches I know insist on masks even if it is a peal or quarter peal with no-one else in the church. One has now relaxed this (though we have to put a sign on the door saying it's 'no longer a covid-secure area'. I can understand the need for masks if there is a large group of ringers, and if it's a ground floor ring with members of the congregation present, but if it's just 6 or 8 ringers and there is sufficiant ventilation, I think that the band should be allowed to decide for themselves. And if the church have a policy on wearing masks and someone is unable to ring wearing one, can they claim an excemption?