Ringing Forums

Connected point. Although it was not a handbell peal, the difficult peal of 23 spliced we rang yesterday morning had three people who learned the grids, three who learned lines (but with grid awareness) and someone who was a bit of both.

The handbell ringers tend to be the grid learners. It does lead to conductor instruction being of the place notation of the first section if there is a mistake at the start of a lead, e.g "56x36!", the beauty of which is it can sort a few people's uncertainties out at the same time.

No they won't, because they are part of a team. We are very aware of what the challenges of this are.

I have often thought of this in terms of "sending the elevator back down", a concept I have talked about in many an after dinner speech. Sending the elevator back down to give others a helpful lift, is the approximate quote.

In ringing terms, teaching others is sending the elevator back down, but what is inefficient about ringing training is that the elevator tends to get sent down much too far, because those on internediate floors aren't doing enough of the training. So for instance you get every experienced surprise maximus ringers teaching bell handling whereas it would be better if they were running surprise major practices, and those attendees were doing the teaching of those on lower floors. So the surprise major practices tend not to happen.

If you only have a finite amount of teaching time in you then having it taken up by teaching very many floors down, rather than just a few floors down, means the higher floors don't actually get taught. And I think that is what happens in reality, certainly where I live. Where I see it most is i the Birmingham School where the helpers at any particular tower will be a mixture of Red and Black Zone ringers, and it really doesn't matter to the students whether the helpers can ring Cambridge Minor or cyclic spliced maximus - they just need the helpers to ringing Bob Minor or whatever and not be scary in any way. The School has been very successul in turning students into helpers, but not as yet into teachers.

I am not absolutely convinced by "prestige" of teaching, although there is certainly kudos attached to it. Does it make less experienced ringers reluctant to teach? I am not sure. My idea for the Cast of 1000 word work if all those people who go off peal ringing every Saturday could just commit one Saturday a month to helping at a ringing school. But they don't because the structure is not yet in place. If doing a day's teaching at a ringing school really was prestigious, then this plan could be accellerated because all these peal ringers would be knocking my door down to participate.

I do intend to be pretty open wiht this process and I will set up part of the Council website to post reports etc. Even the initial brief we gave to agencies when we were selecting one. Everyone's opinion is valuable on this one!

I pose a real life dilemma for you as we are on the subject of recruits. At the Birmingham School of Bell Ringing we now have a waiting list for Tower A bell handling. We are saying to new people who want to learn that we can start them in the new year. The scarce resource is the number of teachers. Last Saturday morning, four of us were teaching six learners.

We expect students to spend no more than 10 weeks at Tower A. Younger recruits spend far less time there. How long do you give someone to pass Level 1 (competent bell handling) before saying that they are taking up a valuable space and maybe ringing is not for them?

You're missing the point. We don't have a rich source of recruits and we don't turn anyone down, and probably never will. This is about creating more recruits who are knocking on our door because they have heard how great a thing to do ringing is, they think it will suit them, and they want to learn. It is all additional.

This is right - the reason for getting outside help is that we need to see ringing from the outside to really understand how to attract the right recruits. First we do need to understand all the different motivations, all the types of people for whom ringing becomes 'their thing'. As JAH said - select those who are well suited to ringing and likely to do well.

There is an old adage that half of all marketing expenditure is wasted - the dificulty is knowing which half. The most effective marketing is as targeted as possible, so once you determine which sorts of people you want to attract, you go out looking for them and deliver them the right message. We don't do that at the moment with a couple of exceptions. Exception one is the church notice board which does at least target those who are going to church anyway. Exception two is children of existing ringers, who are very easy to get to and who at the moment probably form the mainstay of most youth teams.

Exactly. Marketing companies usually have 'non standard' names - it's just part of what they are. It's a shame that already some are looking for negatives.

When I wrote 'three weekly' I was expecting it to be queried! But the sentence seemed to flow quite well as written and it was quite late.

I did write about the Queen in the previous Ringing World, just not in a blog post, and it didn't get posted online.

Interested by what you say about the two 'wrinklies' groups. I have log thought there are two groups (not of older ringers, but of ringers generally). There is what I call the 'service' group who are happy to do their stuff at their local tower with no particular need to progress, and then there are those who are interested in developing their ringing and will read and travel in order to do it. The latter might join a direct membership organisation that served to develop change ringing, and pay for it, while the former group probably wouldn't see the point.

The point about 2030 is that there are some things that need to be done which might take quite a long time, particularly to do with the structure and organisation of ringing associations, BRFs, etc. A Direct Membership Organistion looks to be more feasible if you think there could be a transition plan to get there. There might be 10 different strands of things we ought to try and change, all of which will take different amounts of time, but all of them probably possible with a will to do them. Other things, as discussed here, could be quicker.

The meeting itself might have been a 'pointless talking shop' as you describe, but many of the committees did lots of stuff that perhaps went unnoticed, or their work was not particularly publicised. Not all committees did lots of stuff of course, and that became part of the problem. I was at the meeting when we had the Philip Earis outburst, when he challenged one committee chairman on the lack of activity in the committee. It depends on how broad your definition of 'Central Council' is.

and I don't suppose those listening really minded

Yes, very frustrating. Unfortunately I spent the whole day in the Welsh mountains as well with no signal so couldn't help Vicki Chapman clarify. No one understood about these local proclamations, and also the Cof E then admitted they had got their dates wrong.

Yes that it interesting that they have redefined D day. Lots of places have already made arrangements to ring open on Saturday. Some checking to be done.

your area does sound particularly tough

One of the reasons for establishing the RingingForums was to get away from the Facebook groups where people insult each other. We all have different experiences to share. Let's get back to a civil discussion

Surrey definitable has a very good membership system which I was talking to someone about on Saturday night. It overcomes GDPR concerns too.

CAMRA is a model which, if we were starting from scratch, is what we might well invent. Membership of the national organisation, regional branches, which are split if any branch becomes so large that it is no longer meeting the needs of its members. Local branches don't generally hold their own funds (or are not supposed to hold too much) but if they have a major promitional activity like a beer festival they get a loan or grant from HQ.

There is a network of Regional Directors, each responsible for 20 or so branches. They don't interfere but they are helpful.

Google glass, which never saw the commercial light of day, would have enabled a conductor to ring a peal with the composition projected as a head up display. But why would anyone do it? The mental challenge is part of why we do it, why we spend hours and hours learning methods and compositions, why we accept the risk that after hours, mental error might thwart your efforts.

and at st Martin's Birmingham every fourth sally is blue for just this reason!