Ringing Forums

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).

I don’t see people thinking teaching bell handling is prestigious but I do think people need a certain level of experience and confidence in their own bell handling before starting to teach others. I have seen some ringers start teaching within two years of learning and this can work very well as they remember what was difficult and explain next steps in simple terms.
I think many less experienced ringers are nervous about volunteering to teach bell handling and need to know that they can learn to teach in a supported way, with ART as the obvious easy way to support people in learning to teach bell handling.
But I also see that only a small minority of ringers are willing to invest time to support others, support organisation and take responsibility to make more ringing possible and for a fully voluntary organisation that’s an issue. I think our internal marketing campaign is along the lines of give something back, how can you help ringing to succeed in the future so that you can continue to enjoy it? Learning to teach handling and committing to helping one Saturday morning a month (or similar) with training sessions or special practices would be really helpful but often the few who have always done it continue and not many new / extra people volunteer to get involved.

The Middlesex has a few unattached members but mainly relies on membership via a tower. It’s definitely less important than it used to be when it comes to the admin and collecting subscriptions as people want to pay via bank transfer instead of cash to a tower contact.
And in the end it makes very little difference to the experience of ringers as the mailing list, website and newsletter are open to all so anyone can join in with ringing anywhere, regardless of whether they are a member or which tower is their ‘home tower’.
For me, administrating the subscriptions for the district, a tech supported process would be great so it sits on the backlog list of things I will research when I have time! So I will be interested to hear any solution you find for Sussex.