Ringing Forums

You are not alone and it is frustrating!
As a district secretary I also have the task of asking tower contacts to confirm their details and tell me if details need to change each year. This can be surprisingly difficult with a small proportion of tower contacts so I can see why we end up with out dated information or lack of response from some towers across the country.
If you wanted some data on it you could ask the Dove team as they have been emailing lots of tower contacts about bell information so may have (or could start to collate) the proportion where they don’t get a reply or are told ‘I haven’t been ringing for years who need to contact X’.
Often this is the same contact for learning to ring at a tower so it doesn’t help our recruitment if we don’t have a responsive contact available for people.

I think this is a common issue, strategy looks for the gaps which need filling or the areas of weakness to address but that can leave the ‘successful’ demographic feeling left out or unwanted. Ringing 2030 talks a lot about how to attract young ringers, to learn and to stay with ringing for the long term because there are not many young ringers learning and staying at the moment. The success with adult learners, and especially adults coming to ringing with more time available in the second half of their life, means there is no strategy needed for recruitment here.
However, any strategy for supporting ongoing development should apply to all recent learners, gaining experience, wanting to ring more complex methods or to strike better (or to ring at more towers, etc) as age is not a defining factor then.
I do see situations where younger learners are given more opportunities, more advice and find there are more expectations for them to keep developing at pace, to understand new jargon quickly and be ready to keep moving on. But I do also see older ringers who do their homework and show serious interest being given similar opportunities, advice and a push towards their development. So, as with most things, it probably depends who you ring with and how you demonstrate and explain that you want to keep progressing your ringing but a little like the women in ringing focus you may need to be firmer that you do want to progress to avoid being pigeonholed as a happy, community minded ringer who will cover very well for the rest of their ringing career.
The general concept of being open minded about why people want to ring and how people want to develop (or not) could well be a Ringing 2030 theme as ringers can be put off by any external expectations, pushing them forward or holding them back, when it’s based on assumptions rather than individual wants and needs.

I know three towers near me where there had been no ringing and then a band was set up (after new bells / major work on the bells) and it is definitely hard work, usually relying on one or two key people who are willing to teach and develop the new band AND rope in extra support from other towers near by. All three are still active 8-10 years later but all could ideally do with a few more ringers to ensure weekly service ringing and practices and the chance to keep developing ringing ability. They are lucky in that it’s London so if your home tower can’t help you progress it’s reasonably easy to join a second practice each week or join district practices for progression.

One tower near me is currently attempting to re-build a band, currently they have three ringers who call it their home tower, two of whom regularly ring elsewhere to get more opportunities. A local experienced ringer took on the challenge and arranged teaching sessions for new learners and calls for help to support practices once or twice a month. The congregation were invited to come and see what bellringing is about and this resulted in three learners of which one really stuck at it. This will be repeated again, nearly a year later, to see if there are more to recruit from within the congregation. Again it has relied heavily on one organiser and the helpers they are able to pull together from other towers nearby and it is still a good way from being a sustainable and independent band.

I’ve sent you an email with the Middlesex Association information.

@Peter Sotheran - From my occasional visits to other towers, I get the impression that many of them don't feel any affinity with the branch. Is it for these towers to find the branch contacts and seek them out, or is it for the branch to adopt a 'evangelical' approach and try to draw them in?

I agree that this is true for some towers within most Associations and Guilds and I think the challenge is that the Officers who would need to do the evangelical outreach are volunteers with busy lives and a high level of existing commitment which makes it hard to also add visiting the less involved towers.
So it does happen to some extent, in many Associations and Guilds, but it’s also useful to make it easy for ringers in these towers to find information and contacts if they want to look for opportunities.
So keeping a website up to date, providing a place to make contacts through Facebook and sending an email to all members two or four times a year can help ringers in less connected towers to find connection to the Association or Guild.
All of which requires input, time and commitment from core people within the Association.

@Roger Booth made the point that often new ringers have lots of enthusiasm and are therefore willing to travel for opportunities to ring and wiling to support the Association or Guild to do more.
I think sometimes we need to be more open about our needs within a Committee of Officers and ask for volunteers who can update the website, or visit less visited towers with news of the activities available and not worry that people who might volunteer to do this are not the most experienced ringers.
I can imagine that simple introduction guidelines and ‘how to’ for these kind of activities could be made available on the CCCBR website to make it easier for someone to feel confident about tackling the five year out of date Association website or setting up a newsletter email which hasn’t been sent since pre-Covid times. Whilst every Association and Guild is different greater opportunities to share ways of doing things ought to be helpful if we are needing / wanting to grow the level of activity through new volunteers.

We have just moved to MemberMojo for Middlesex and one of the things I found, which surprised me slightly, is that I can’t easily email all members unless it’s about renewal of membership, unless we also use MailChimp or equivalent.
So, I think, and I’m not yet an expert, that we couldn’t easily use this as a newsletter route (which is okay for Middlesex as we have a Google group for easy distribution of information to interested ringers (members or not).

I do agree that some ringers aren’t told about the website and email list opportunities in their area and many are delighted when they realise there is support for their progression once they know that district or branch activity exists. It still feels valuable to get active members out and about to less interactive towers to meet the ringers and encourage them to check the website or join the mailing list, etc (even when it is not encouraged from within their tower).

I wonder, maybe a rude question (!), whether CCCBR Reps should have more responsibility for sharing information to Association and Guild mailing lists, with a more personal reason to engage rather than the emails which say ‘I’ve been told to forward this to our members’ from a Secretary role with no active knowledge or involvement in the content shared.

I found this a useful summary of the objections to the changes in Truro: https://savetheparish.blogspot.com/2023/12/bishop-hugh-and-his-diocesan-supporters.html

I think it has an interesting focus on the non church going community who want the church to still be there in a traditional way and I guess many bellringers fall into this category - not church goers for service but would like the church building to be protected and to continue to be used for services as well as community activities on a regular basis.

The Church of England is in a strange situation because many people who don’t join services regularly and wouldn’t be part of PCC meetings do care about the continuity of the church as a place to visit occasionally but if the ever smaller congregation can’t finance the church it’s hard to keep it open (although I hear the argument that far too much cost now sits in the diocese and that’s why churches struggle financially).
I can see how a strong Diocese leadership can encourage local parish councils to want to join without them necessarily understanding where it could lead or feeling like they have a real choice and certainly that’s part of the feedback in the Truro blogpost.

I find it hard because I wouldn’t particularly want to see growth in church congregations and a move towards being more religious as a nation but I also see that if churches close and have less frequent services it takes away the core reason for ringing and the provision of the bell tower and it will be very expensive for bellringing to create new venues or to finance church availability if it is not part of natural church activities.
Choirs exist outside of church and religion, etc very easily. I don’t think there is a comparable activity as a guide to how to move forward in this scenario.

The Ringing World 10th November has an article from Richard Smith. This is the most relevant part. But it is taking about 1530’s rather than anything significantly earlier than that.

“Late in the sixteenth century, William Byrd (c1540–1623) composed a short air for the virginal, a keyboard instrument like a harpsichord. It was named The Bells and descending scales feature prominently, clearly intended to evoke the sound of church bells. This tells us that bells being rung in rounds was a familiar part of the soundscape of the day. Twenty Ways upon the Bells, a piece for two lutes by Thomas Robinson that was published in 1603 also prominently features fivebell descending scales, reinforcing the idea that rounds was being rung by the end of the sixteenth century.

Andrew’s article quotes the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of Henry VIII which says that during the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536, the people ‘rung bells backwards’. This is an interesting new piece of evidence. The earliest description I had found of bells being rung backwards was in the State Papers Domestic of Elizabeth I (Addenda, 1566–79, p.105) from 1569. During the Rising of the North, another Catholic uprising in the north of the country, the Earl of Northumberland took Topcliffe Bridge ‘and rang the bells backward’. As Andrew says, these accounts tell us that there must have been a usual order for bells to be rung – presumably rounds – and the population could tell when they were being rung backwards. This new source pushes the date of rounds back from Elizabethan times to the eve of the Dissolution.”

The Andrew mentioned is Andrew White, who wrote a previous Ringing World article about ringing around the time of the Dissolution. So there clearly is some research out there but nothing looking as far back as you, from what I can see.

There’s a recent Ringing World article about ringing backwards in early emergencies about three / four weeks ago. I’ll try and find the page number.

There are already chiming sets in many churches so that small, inexpensive bells can play perfect Bristol Major for every occasion. There is a church in Kensal Green which does this, playing for the Coronation, for the Bishop’s visit, etc. These sets of bells are less expensive to install and require less maintenance, because they are hung dead and chimed with hammers. So this is a definitely an option which the church is aware of.
I did also hear that some churches played a recording of their bells at the start of virtual services during Covid when the bells were not being rung.

Bellringing is more like archery than cycling or running, more like hot air ballooning than heritage railways because you need specific space and equipment but only those involved really benefit (most of the time).
In my experience few people from outside invest into bellringing (some of the heritage guilds and liveries have done in the City of London) so we probably need to be prepared to consolidate as churches close and costs to keep towers running need to match available and interested ringers.

I can’t think of any obvious example where an equivalent art / sport / heritage activity has taken off as mainstream and grown in a way which makes it financially secure and well attended in cities, towns and villages across the country.
I think the earlier we stop the decline the more chance we have of keeping as many towers and bands functioning as possible and this will depend on the number of ringers who will act to help with recruitment, training and supportive ringing, ringers who would really miss it if it was gone rather than simply shrugging shoulders and doing something else one evening a week.
The issue is that this might be only 10-25% of current ringers (judging by those willing to take on a role in the local guild or association or get involved in additional ringing purely to support others, etc) but this is an unknown number as people haven’t really been asked to try to stop a crisis and I guess Ringing 2030 needs to, gently and positively, help ringers understand the risk of not getting involved.

I see this part: “ Many ringers are ringing for themselves and not for the future” as key. Ringing will decline where too many ringers just want to ring for themselves and not to develop others and pass on the enjoyment of their hobby to others. Perhaps this is a missing focus in Ringing 2030 as the marketing to find new ringers will not help if existing ringers are not interested to teach and support those new ringers.

I think the hard thing is that the one main connection, making the difference between a well loved and well used tower with a happy band and the tower left to gradually disintegrate is one or two willing volunteers with decent communication skills and a desire to run a good tower. Finding these people, supporting them and developing the next volunteers isn’t easy but is the key. I think the importance of the leadership is recognised as a challenge for Ringing 2030 but the grass roots volunteer set up doesn’t make it easy to ignite change everywhere and local experiences will continue to vary hugely.

A lot of this thread is bad experiences followed by answers about existing resources which demonstrate better ways of approaching continuous learning.
Which means that the issue is not that there isn’t a known set of techniques to support learners to continue to progress but that some towers are not making use of these resources and get stuck or prefer another way of doing it, despite this leading to frustration for at least some of the ringers in the tower.

Tristan says that lacking humility to unpick flawed teaching is part of the problem and I think this is probably the fundamental issue.
Tower captains who teach ‘badly’ or don’t use the many resources available to think about how to help ringers to continue to progress (or are happy to keep everyone ringing Sunday morning called changes forever) are able to continue and, as volunteers, are unlikely to be pushed to change their ways.

The nature of ringing as a grass roots organisation at a very local level, with everyone a volunteer, means it is unlikely that this will change without two sets of effort - the local effort to address with a specific tower captain and band whether change is needed and the global effort to ensure the resources are there AND that there is support to understand how to make use of the resources, perhaps with more training courses for tower captains and ringing masters.

Ringing can’t realistically dictate a set of standards for how a practice should be run but can try to spread best practice and if the issue is the tower leadership then the next big course to be considered would be how to be an effective tower captain rather than how to ring bob doubles (again) as this should, in theory, have a longer term impact on gradual progression for more ringers.

Currently it can to be hard to find a volunteer willing to lead a tower when one moves away, gets ill, etc and many towers struggle when the previous main organiser is no longer there so if there are towers where the leadership is creating frustration for the ringers then the volunteer needs to come from within the band otherwise it won’t change.

ART has a simple starting point exercise for tower captains: http://ringingteachers.org/survival-and-recovery-toolbox/tower-captains-guide/tower-captain-type - I have seen other training courses around this same kind of idea so it’s hard to see what else needs to be done at the more global level to try to support change for the towers where ringers are frustrated.

Is it about raising the need for support with the district / branch / association / guild to address the frustrations of the band?
Is it that most of the band are happy to continue as they are, rather than cause upset by looking for change?
Maybe there is an element of ‘growing out of’ one practice where you can now only support and no longer progress and needing to find the next practice in your area which can keep you progressing?

I read the article in the Ringing World (29 Sept, page 950) about Ringing 2030 and the focus on effective recruitment to boost overall numbers of ringers.
One of the most active threads on this forum is about older learners and reasons why we should not assume that older learners don’t want to / can’t keep progressing into method ringing.

The article on 2030 recruitment makes the assumption that we need to recruit young ringers if we are to rebuild the overall number of ringers, demonstrating that the ageing population of existing ringers will gradually lead to a lower overall population.
I think this misses the point that we have lots of older learners and many of them still have 30 years of ringing ahead of them when they learn.

I hope that the recent trial survey of ringers shows that we have many ringers over 40 and over 60 who have been ringing less than five years and less than ten years so there is no obvious reason to assume that if you don’t learn under 20 (or under 40) that you won’t become a regular ringer who builds experience and rings for many years to come.
I think we should be careful not to focus exclusively on recruiting young ringers and be careful not to leave older learners feeling unwanted, uncared for or disregarded when we look at the future of ringing for 2030 and beyond.

Identifying how to focus our resources to recruit the ‘types of people who we think will make good and useful bellringers’ should not be about age specifically but wider considerations of commitment, enjoyment and appreciation of bellringing.
Did the trial survey show any trends in educational subjects? Should we be asking ringers about their other hobbies / regular activities? How do we know whether someone is more likely to definitely enjoy and commit to bellringing?

From my experience it is hard to tell until someone has been along three or four times and then becomes fairly obvious.
If you then ‘lose’ them later it is because they are moving house, have family responsibilities, change job, etc (when hopefully they will still be ringing somewhere) or due to illness (when they can no longer ring or no longer climb the stairs). This can happen at any age and young ringers are more likely to be moving around and many ringers go through a non ringing phase when establishing a career, a family, etc.

I don’t think the teaching pathway is any different based on the age of the learner, I think the opportunity given in local towers is a factor but I also think ringers range hugely from those most interested in the music or the community aspect to those wanting to do ‘homework’ outside the tower and travel to a variety of practices for opportunities to learn and progress in method ringing.
I can think of a three mature learners in my local area, two of whom really pushed and took every opportunity and rang their first quarter peal of plain bob doubles inside within two years of first touching a rope and the third who was something like six months later. But they were all ringing three or more times a week, doing their homework and asking for support to keep them progressing. Four years later one has since rung surprise Major quarter peals, another surprise minor and the third is now ringing touches of plain bob triples or trebling to surprise minor so progress varies for a variety of reasons.
I don’t know whether London is unusual but there are very few towers here which focus heavily on called changes, most are looking to get people to cover and then plain hunt and then treble and then ring methods inside and this is definitely harder if there are less steady support ringers than progressing ringers at a practice night but I can’t think of a practice night which spends more time on called changes than methods.

Yes, there was quite a lot of feedback on the survey design, some specific questions and the flow of questions.
The tower captains survey needs some adjustments for towers without a regular band (as having said you don’t have a regular practice you were still asked lots of questions about what you practice and what teaching you do, etc) and the ringers survey needs to allow for ‘unattached’ ringers.
I have passed the feedback I received on, in detail, and I’m sure the other trial areas will have done the same so an improved version can be used by other Associations and Guilds, if they want to add to the volume of data available for analysis.

Another possible reason for the younger learners ring more often and more advanced methods could be that these ringers are more likely to complete a survey.
In the Middlesex we sent the survey to our email list and asked tower contacts to send it on to other band members. Many people on the email list will be more active and more advanced ringers who ring more often because that’s why they want to receive the emails about district and association activities so this could influence the results.
Someone who learnt young but still ‘just’ rings on Sunday morning, happily enough, is less likely to have seen the survey and less likely to see a reason to complete a survey to help a national organisation which doesn’t really impact them think about the future.

Another possible factor which could be interesting to explore is whether it is true that people who learnt in the ‘golden age’ of ringing past were better supported to reach advance method ringing and therefore learning young thirty plus years ago was easier and better supported where learning young now might not be so much.
Having met a couple of returning ringers, who learnt thirty plus years ago and came back as Ring for the King returners, it seems that plenty of people also learnt to ring in years gone by and gave up finding it less satisfying than some others who stuck with it. So it’s hard to know if the experience and the percentage which stick at it and enjoy it has really changed or not.

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).

Ouch! That sounds very harsh and I’m surprised it could be so different in NW England to other areas. I ring in London and I know we are lucky that this is geographically easier, with good public transport making it easy to ring at multiple towers but still.
I do agree that an annual course but no chance to practice the methods regularly in between is of little help. Most Associations have some organised training to help and / or district practices which can also help. Maybe we need to do more to spread best practice on support for developing bands. The Ringing Course Value for Money thread shares one such example of regular support for tower bands who want to progress. But this definitely relies on experienced ringers being willing to invest time to help developing ringers and in most areas this seems to be normal and satisfying for many experienced ringers.

Sussex also chose MemberMojo and have a good set of FAQ’s on their website: https://www.scacr.org/documents/membership/MemberMojo_Q-A.pdf

I’m looking into it as a possibility for Middlesex.

I think you have three ways you can approach this, and all will mean talking to local people to see what can be arranged.
1 - check what district practices exist with a focus on method ringing at different stages to see which of these you can go along to (and request the practices you need from the district ringing master if they are not currently planned)
2 - find out which towers regularly ring the methods you are interested in at their weekly practice to see if you could join their practices in future
3 - set up focused practice sessions or quarter peal attempts for the specific methods you are interested in, with support from experienced ringers

All of these will be more or less possible depending on the ringers in your local area and how far you can travel but you are probably not the only one with a similar experience in your area if the influx of learners means there is limited time for method ringing.
Being on the geographical boundary of Essex, Herts and Middlesex probably doesn’t help as many practices will be designed to be central to the district so you might find organising something specific is the best answer and you need to find other ringers in your area at a similar stage. The tower captains where you ring, the district ringing masters and training officers are all likely to be able to help with this.