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BELLS
AND BELLRINGING - 2
Our Church of St Giles has eight bells but,
in common with many other churches of a similar age, did not
acquire them all at the same time. The original six bells
were cast at various times by different founders between 1728
and 1824, and were obviously not ideal as they were all recast
in 1912. This work was carried out by Gillett and Johnson,
a Croydon bell foundry. In those days the bells were rung
from a gallery situated above the Penn pew, with the ringers
having their own entrance via a door in the north wall of
the church. This door has now been replaced by a window. In
1937 Gillett and Johnson added two bells to complete the octave,
at the same time rehanging the bells in a steel frame at a
higher level in the tower and moving the ringing room to its
present position. The ringing room is now reached by means
of an external iron staircase which can be quite hazardous
in frosty weather! Several beams from the old wooden frame
remain around the walls of the present ringing room. Other
parts of the old frame went to make the outer lych gate in
the churchyard.
We now have a very fine ringing peal with the lightest
bell weighing 3½ cwt and the heaviest (known as the tenor) 13½
cwt; the ring is tuned to the scale of F#. The bells are popular with
visiting ringers and are also very suitable for beginners, as they are
particularly easy to handle. The firm of Gillett and Johnson was very
active in the 19th and early 20th century, and produced several excellent
rings of bells, but increasingly came under competition from their rivals,
John Taylor & Co (Loughborough) and Mears and Stainbank (Whitechapel).
They eventually went out of business in the early 1950's.
To many ringers, a peal of eight bells is regarded as
the optimum number, as they can be tuned to a full octave. For change
ringing purposes they need to be equipped with the fittings to enable them
to be rung full circle, as illustrated in my previous article. Smaller
churches may have fewer bells (or none at all), and change ringers rapidly
lose interest in towers with less than five bells or where full-circle
ringing is not possible. Conversely, some larger churches and cathedrals
have more than eight bells - for example, Slough has ten, and High
Wycombe, Amersham and Reading have rings of twelve bells. It requires a
greater degree of skill to ring changes accurately on these higher
numbers, and most ringers regard twelve as the maximum. Towers such as St
Martin's-in-the-Bull Ring, Birmingham, where sixteen bells were recently
installed, are still regarded as a curiosity, although rung regularly to a
high standard by the local band.
In the next article I will outline the theory of change
ringing, and will endeavour to explain how sequences of changes are
produced on different numbers of bells.
P.H.M.
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