Ringing Forums

Yes! That’s the article I remember. Thank you.

Maybe there are some useful ideas here: https://www.festivalchurches.org.uk/case-studies/
But I can’t find the article I was thinking of (sorry).

I don’t know whether anyone can really provide evidence that changes they have made enable them to be financially viable for the future but I do remember an article about a church I think in Cornwall which had significantly increased ‘visitors’ and donations by bringing in community activities ranging from ringing sessions to playgroups. I think it was part of the Save the Parish information but it might have been a Ringing World article.

There’s a discussion thread called The Road to Wigan’s Tears which goes into this topic a little bit and Simon Linford has provided some good information on categories of churches and what level of attendance / funding a church needs to achieve to survive.

I guess the St Clements Cambridge model uses ringing as a way to keep a church building open every day but this works for Cambridge as a city with lots of visitors and wouldn’t work in a rural village so it will depend on the exact location.
I remember being surprised in the article about the church in (I think) Cornwall that very few regular visitors were needed to justify keeping the church open and be considered a success.

My home tower church is considered a success because the church is hired out for recordings and filming and this brings in income despite a relatively small congregation but this works because it’s in London and with good acoustics so wouldn’t work everywhere.

I think I would start by looking at the equivalent community hall facilities in the local area and what happens there, if there is already a scout hut or Methodist hall or similar being used for yoga classes, music for toddlers, etc then the church has less chance of finding other users but if there’s a need for spaces which is not fulfilled then churches work well as food banks, libraries, cafes, music venues…

We had an approach from an American university who had a London summer placement to explore music and heritage. They paid, based on wedding fee rates for six and something generous for the tower and the cost of the ART Discover books, for a one hour experience.
That was fairly targeted because they were specifically in London to link music to heritage and that lends itself to an introduction to bellringing talk.

If you can only provide two ringers then you are more limited but you could still get them chiming in rounds with the bells down, possibly use handbells for some called changes and depending on your tower kit show a video of full circle change ringing.
Lots of people find the simple experience of climbing a spiral staircase to a room the public don’t normally see exciting. If you can add in some local fun facts or a view from the tower they will enjoy it.

On the other hand… I went on a mystery picnic which was a birthday gift and it was well put together to take you to independent shops and collect picnic ingredients, visit a herb bed at the park and see some sights. So I can see how something similar with a bellringing experience could work. People who choose this sort of event are likely to be curious and open minded so it could be a combination of PR and recruitment.

The high level of experienced ringers needed to support fast tracked progress is definitely the issue, the place where bellringing struggles compared to many other activities where one teacher can help small groups to improve.
The use of simulators for extending the ringing repertoire is not perfect, nothing is quite the same as ringing with ‘real’ ringers who a) smile at you but b) go wrong sometimes, but improving how we use simulator sessions feels like a key to supporting people to extend their capabilities in between high effort sessions for which people may have to travel quite far, etc.
If we tried cast of 1000 with a full day of ringing every second month and ‘homework’ to be done with simulator / Abel / pen and paper in between it could be more productive than relying on regular practice sessions.

The part about accepting people who won’t go further and how to manage that is definitely a tough one in local district / branch arrangements as some people will continue to come and ask to ring the same method month after month without ever seeming to improve and it’s not really possible to ask them not to come, you can only really (in my experience) encourage them to do some homework and set themselves some goals. But we notice some of the ringers with better potential get frustrated with the ‘wasted’ time or poor quality ringing and are then less likely to come to the practice themselves which becomes a vicious circle if you then miss the ringers who could be supporting more challenging ringing.

John Harrrison’s article in the RW this week talks about a decline in membership two to three years after each special push for new ringers. One of the reasons for this seems likely to be that some of those ringers find they can’t progress any further at their tower and don’t feel supported by the Branch or District to keep them progressing and another proposed reason, which could also be true for some, is that bands become overwhelmed by learners who all need to practice endless plain hunt (for example) and some of the more experienced ringers lose interest or the tower stops recruiting while getting this batch of learners to a standard.
Every time we aim to increase the ringing population quickly we hit this kind of barrier so asking the experienced ringers to help becomes increasingly tiresome (for many).
This does suggest that methods which allow for more solo learning and practice, mixed with very targeted opportunities with the investment of support from experienced ringers, will become more and more important as the available bank of experienced ringers decreases (based on the age profile of ringers).

Paying for the kind of support offered in the ARA would make it a very expensive ringing course so we probably do need to work on the basis of making helping attractive (by limiting how often we ask, ensuring the students are well prepared to make the most of it, offering interesting towers, enjoyable socialising around the ringing, etc). I guess ARA students could be asked to offer their time for a next level down RA the following summer, something targeting surprise minor / Stedman triples, for young ringers who may have had less opportunity to be seen and less opportunity to get into surprise ringing which would ease the burden on the grown ups and set the culture for paying it forward.

Angela (as a RFTK returner) has used a variety of ways to ask people to get in touch if they are willing to join the Marketing workgroup and what she gets is lots of views on what the workgroup has done badly in the past or what needs to be done beyond the remit of the Marketing workgroup and no actual volunteers to get involved.
It’s no wonder that available enthusiasm walks away and focuses on more local activities where it is easier to make an impact as a willing individual.
The major challenges don’t change, small scale solutions are being tried in a variety of local ways, failure to drive bigger / faster change is the responsibility of everyone who has awareness of the issues and the chance to be involved. The Central Council is an amalgamation of ringers who aim to work together to help improve ringing but we all have the chance to be part of it and it’s easy to criticise without investing time in trying to help.
I understand the frustration that change can be very slow in a volunteer led set up which relies on people (associations and towers) choosing to adopt ideas and strategies (because they can’t be told what to do) but I don’t think the Exec or the Council can be held responsible for the current situation without acknowledging that they are the product of the ringers overall.

I think for each local Association to set themselves up to be an employer would be relatively high investment / effort when they are likely, at least at the start, to be employing one or two people only. If the church is already an employer then it’s easier for them to add one person to the payroll. If the CCCBR becomes an employer then it too could scale up. But I agree that the current CCCBR is not set up to offer the service of being the employer for local ringing centres.
The administration and responsibility of becoming an employer is a barrier to changing the model for bellringing because it is generally so locally driven.

The piano teacher quoted above raises a slightly different context of ‘gig economy’ employment or self employed ringing teachers who could earn money direct from students but I wonder whether this could really be practical with insurance, using the church as a venue and using the church ‘equipment’ with H&S risks, safeguarding risks, etc. Even piano teachers presumably have to be careful about inviting students into their home for lessons, perhaps as a group activity bellringing is safer in some areas and riskier in others.

I'm confident that if we took a realistic and sensible approach people wouldn't mind paying a nominal amount to be taught to ring but I don't know how we change the mindset of those in charge.

Isn’t part of the problem that there is no ‘those in charge’. Each tower can do what it wants (provided the church incumbent doesn’t object). Associations or Guilds have no ‘rules’ on this kind of topic but also no aligned guidelines on what they expect towers in their area to do (so no consistency) and the Central Council is equally ambivalent on the subject.
This is why there are no standard expectations for how to learn to ring (including cost) and a variety of schemes which help someone teach someone with an order of techniques to work through.
I agree that ART is becoming the way to learn to teach and has very supportive schemes for new teachers, teaching new learners.
No one is saying that it should be free (just habits) and some people are starting to charge, with a variety of models.
If we all charged for teaching the bell funds would have way too much money in them (Roger Booth recently made the point in the Ringing World that donations always being targeted at restoration / maintenance projects is not helping currently) so if the teachers don’t want the money where does it go?

If paying is supposed to lead to more teaching being available then we would need to recruit people who will teach (and administrate / organise for teaching).
This is the the model at St Clements Cambridge (for example) and it relies on the church involved to be willing to manage the payroll / employer responsibilities. This could be possible in more places but it’s a fairly big ask of the church.
We probably need to give St Clements three years before we could consider approaching each diocese to have one similar set up OR we need ART or the CCCBR to be willing to be the employer and that would be a significant step for either organisation to take.

Would you advocate a national model with one employer for ringing centres / ringing teachers across the country or would you see it working better if a local employer (like the local church) was the employer but with some standard job descriptions, etc which could be prepared as a CCCBR guideline?

I like this overall message, and the examples of how to give yourself time to think and how to create positive answers.
In recent years we have caused our own general problem with Ringing Remembers and Ring for the King both starting with the premise that we need more bellringers to be able to ring all the bells (rather than ‘we have an exciting opportunity for more people to join us’).
The natural and authentic stories which come from ringers themselves, like the recent Guardian article on a new hobby after 60, tend to have a much more positive outlook and with the rise in social media it is easier for individuals to present what ringing means for them in a quick and visual way which, hopefully, shows the variety of ringers and reasons to ring so raises awareness for more of the public.

What do others think, do we need an up to date guide on Public Relations?
Do we need a printed version, or an online reference point on the CCCBR website?

I think an up to date guide would be useful.
I even think it could be a curated collection of best practice examples from the many tower activities which have made use of social media, local print media and so on for recruitment and general awareness of bellringing over the last three years.

I have a similar concern about the implied contract and the muddle of the transition from learner to helper, which can be mixed even inside one practice.
But I also worry that society is changing in a way which means that fewer people are willing (or able) to fulfil the implied contract and people increasingly choose to pay so that they don’t need to invest time.
There was an exchange on this topic a while back (I think in these forums but I can’t be sure).
Research on volunteering says that people are less likely to volunteer now than they were ten or more years ago and I think this is influencing bell ringing (even if the extent to which you consider yourself a volunteer if you attend a practice where most of your time is being one of the ‘strong’ ringers is not clearly defined.
On the other hand when I look back at annual reports from 30 plus years ago I see the same ‘problem’ that people had more than one role and kept those roles for years at a time, suggesting that people weren’t easily volunteering to take on organisational roles then either.
One of our recruitment challenges is attracting people who can offer sufficient commitment to be a supportive part of a bellringing band but the level of commitment can vary over time in someone’s ringing career.
I suspect we will increasingly offer training at a cost and use a large proportion of the money to pay for the organisation of ringing centres and training courses (rather than primarily for paying the actual teachers or helpers) and I can see how this increases the opportunities for early learning and progression which should bring benefit to all in the long run.

For the first it sounds like the ringer is struggling to understand how to control ringing to the balance each time, and therefore how to be able to choose to wait before the next stroke.
Possibly some time alone to try to ring slower and slower and slower (but with control) might be useful for really feeling where the balance is.
It might also help to go through the mechanics again, a refresher on what the bell is doing and therefore how you can influence it can be useful once someone is able to ring but needs to fine tune.

For the second the most obvious exercise seems to be the hands down and look the tail end is right here for your hand to fall on, wrists together actions because then there is no reason to worry and it should become clear that it is actually easier and takes less time, because your hand arrives at the tail end at the bottom of the hand stroke (no ‘catching’ required).
It might help to demonstrate this yourself (and I’ll bet ART has a video for it) and to get him to try it while you hold the tail end or hover near the tail end so that there’s no pressure. It’s also one which can be practiced with a down bell, simply practicing the movement with no swing in the bell, to make it feel normal to bring the hands all the way down.

Hopefully some of this helps but bellringing.org will have more exercises and videos which might also help.

I recently found this guide to calling Stedman which goes through the numbered calling positions: https://wiki.changeringing.co.uk/Conducting_Stedman
Maybe the bell it is called from has plain sixes before it reaches calling position one?

But I found this because I want to learn to call Stedman so I can’t be sure.

From the Dove’s guide homepage you can click through to more ‘about Dove’s guide’ and this says:

The following type of bell collections are currently in scope:

rings of three or more bells hung for full-circle English-style change ringing;
carillons in the British Isles;
bells weighing 40 cwt or more in the British Isles;
additional bells in the same location as a ring, carillon or 40 cwt bell given above; and
bells in buildings under the jurisdiction of the Church of England as part of its Church Heritage Record.
Future collection types will be added as part of future development.

So I think the only other bells and display bells are those in the same building as a set of bells for change ringing or carillon.

But the Dove’s team seem to be fairly responsive so you could contact them, directly for more clarification or to provide information about bells which could be included but are not yet.

https://dove.cccbr.org.uk/about

I think your best chance of getting local advice is to talk to the district ringing master for the relevant part of Essex (and Herts) as they will probably know the level of ringing at the various practices. Most Association websites give you practices by practice night so if Thursday is the specific aim that will narrow it down.
It’s also worthwhile to talk to the tower captain about your concerns and try to find out why he is focused on Grandsire triples, for example.
Some tower captains focus more on the ringers who ring with them on Sundays and see others who join the practice as ‘visitors’ who are there to support more than to gain.
In general improving your ability to plain hunt on 9 or 11 is helpful towards an end goal of ringing Cambridge because it requires you to place your bell precisely so don’t discount this kind of ringing as good for your overall skill set. But if it is a struggle for too many of the band I can see how that makes it hard to benefit from it.
A practice which has enough ringers to try plain hunt on 11 might also mean the tower Captain worries about the number of people sitting out when practicing minor. It could be a useful conversation to see if they are aware of people’s ringing goals and whether others in the band would also benefit from more ringing of minor and therefore not mind having less total ringing time if it is more targeted ringing time.

I think John and John have given good advice here.
Ultimately many ringers fall somewhere in between, motivated to ring well and sometimes try new things but often looking at ringing as a stress reducing (and sometimes primarily social) hobby.
You feel like you may have failed a leadership test either because the band are not all progressing towards greater technical excellence or because some of the band are unhappy with the expectations of them. Recognising that there is a gap between your aims and theirs is a first sign of good leadership and you are proving that you are a good leader by exploring why some of the band are not comfortable with pressure to try new things (at the moment).
You can work on goals with those who want them and allow others to continue with what is already manageable for them if that’s what different band members need. Your ability to balance different levels of interest in, and approaches to, ringing is all part of the leadership skills of a tower captain and it is not always easy but caring about wanting to keep progressing for those who want to be challenged and wanting to keep those who want a low pressure hobby is a very strong starting point.
Be proud of what you are achieving and what you are learning as the band are, I am sure, grateful that you are willing to be the Tower Captain and take on the difficult responsibility of balancing the needs of everyone each practice.

I think there are two aspects of ART which could help here.
One is the clear path - knowing that you are working through the levels, step by step, to one day ring a quarter peal or to be able to manage a touch in a minor method, etc. This can motivate people as it provides a next step to aim for but in this example you may need to emphasise that there is no rush, it’s fine to enjoy plain hunting for a while before deciding to try steps into method ringing.
The other is the celebration of achievements and sharing of satisfaction which comes in the Tower Talk newsletter and the ART Awards and that sort of thing. Knowing that many other people are also taking their next steps to improve their ringing and prepare to one day ring a quarter peal (or whatever) might also be a motivation that it really is possible, even if it doesn’t feel like it today.

The other big focus in ART is small steps, backwards to go forwards and break it down into smaller pieces. Maybe this learner will benefit from lots of plain hunting, getting really comfortable with it, before being ready to ask to try a next step.
It might be worth trying some methods which are a new challenge for everyone but still plain hunting for the treble, whether that is st Simon’s and st martins or double oxford or even stranger exercises like little penultimate where every other ringer is heavily watching / listening for the treble to know what to do themselves. Then everyone is getting some interesting ringing whilst this learner is ‘allowed’ to stay in the comfort zone of plain hunt (but likely acquiring improvement in rope sight and rhythm skills along the way).

I regularly ring with a Ring for the King learner who said early on that she only ever wanted to be able to cover well, then that she would only ever treble and is now ringing plain bob minor inside and trebling to surprise minor (and still fairly determined that she can’t try something new unless she’s had time to look at it at home first). She sets high standards for herself and hates to feel that she’s gone wrong and ‘ruined’ it for others. So, patiently, we are letting her drive the pace with an occasional suggestion of something she could look at next.

I found this article on the ART website (when looking for something else entirely!) and it shares why lapsed ringers said they enjoyed ringing and why they lapsed fro ringing and (in many cases) returned again later: https://ringingteachers.org/application/files/3616/1220/8169/Why_do_ringers_lapse.pdf
The social side was seen as a greater motivation to ring than the mental exercise but the mental exercise is still a major reason to choose bellringing as an activity.

It might be worth asking how they like to learn or how they tackle new challenges in other parts of life.
Some people are perfectionists and hate doing anything they can’t get 100% right first time. Others like to read about it or watch a video or talk it through in detail before trying it. Some can only learn from doing but might need time in one to one sessions to feel safe about the time it takes to learn the technique. Without knowing what stage they are it’s hard to provide detailed advice but starting by asking them how they tackle learning something new at work or in sports / music etc might give you some idea of what they find difficult about getting it wrong at a bellringing practice (with the emphasis on practice, where everyone gets it wrong at least some of the time!).
I think there was something in the Ringing World a couple of years ago about how hard it can be for adult learners to enjoy learning something where they will make mistakes and struggle, somehow we forget how to be relaxed about learning by failing (and some people have always found that really hard).

I think this is generally tackled locally, because people don’t travel far to ring for weddings.
In general because there are less church weddings than there used to be finding ringers doesn’t seem to be a problem where I ring but I can understand that it is harder in more rural areas.
In general the local guild or association are likely to be aware of the churches which struggle to find ringers and there are regular conversations about how much it is reasonable to charge for ringing for a wedding. Whilst some ringers won’t give up a chunk of Saturday afternoon regardless of the money others will travel further to ring if the money offered does more than simply cover petrol costs.

The only formal mentoring I’m aware of in bellringing is in ART, with teachers having a mentor whilst new to teaching handling.

One possible option would be to have access to the church or church hall for up to an hour before a district practice so that people could meet and find a quiet place to talk but still in a defined space with other ringers around them.

I would also question whether a one to one mentor is what is needed or whether small group learning sessions, away from ringing time, would be more useful as people could join the level or topic useful to them in groups of three or four and learn from each other as well as from the nominated expert.
It depends a lot on what you are aiming to achieve but in our district we find training sessions which include a theory session are well received (sometimes on zoom and sometimes in the tower before ringing starts).

As people learn at different speeds and in different ways you would probably need to consider swapping mentors, for at least some people, as often as twice a year.

I think it’s quite important to set clear expectations - a mentor cannot ‘fix’ or ‘solve’ every struggle for a learner, equally they should not start getting into personal assessments of future capabilities, there should be clear learning goals agreed and some clear definition of the time the pair will invest, probably including ‘I’ll come to your practice on the first Tuesday one month and you can come to my practice on the first Wednesday the next month and we’ll meet half an hour before the practice to talk’ or similar.

If you do try this it would be very interesting to hear the results and feedback six months and then a year later as this could be useful for many associations.