Thinking allowed

Cambridge Major

It’s quite a while since I began to learn Cam­bridge Minor, and my teach­er asks me each week wheth­er I have looked at Cam­bridge Major. I keep reply­ing (truth­fully) that I haven’t had any time. So this week he had me ring Cam­bridge Major with anoth­er ringer stand­ing behind me and telling me what to do. This is not ideal, but it works tol­er­ably well, since the exten­sions from Cam­bridge Minor are not too com­plic­ated — it’s just a ques­tion of know­ing when to do them. Later in the prac­tice we did the same thing again. Neither time did we quite com­plete a plain course, and that was partly because I man­aged to lose my place. Not hav­ing the big pic­ture of the meth­od, so to speak, does make it harder to ring.

How­ever, hav­ing done this, and hav­ing briefly glanced at the blue line and Cole­man a couple of times, it began to impress the meth­od in my head, and I found that as I drove home from the prac­tice I could just about remem­ber and/or recon­struct the meth­od. So now I am at that state of learn­ing a new meth­od: when over and over again, at the inter­stices of routine, I find myself recit­ing the dif­fer­ent pieces of work involved — when stuck in a traffic jam, or brush­ing my teeth, or sit­ting in a not-too-excit­ing meet­ing. This is an import­ant part of learn­ing a new meth­od — com­mit­ting the pieces of work to memory, so that they can be recalled without effort when ringing it.

Pre­vi­ously I have also com­mit­ted to memory the actu­al pos­i­tion at each pull. This time, I have not (yet) tried to do so, partly because just remem­ber­ing the order of work is suf­fi­ciently com­plic­ated without adding any­thing else, and partly because the dif­fi­cult bits of work (front­work, back­work, and Cam­bridge places up and down) are essen­tially identic­al to those of Cam­bridge Minor, and there­fore already reas­on­ably well known. The dif­fer­ences are the obvi­ous ones when ringing on 8, rather than 6, bells — the back­work is done on 7 and 8, not 5 and 6; and places up and down must be rung in 5–6 as well as in 3–4.

So, from memory, this is the order of work in a plain course of Cam­bridge Major:

front­work
dodge 3–4 up

dodge 2‑and‑1 at the back
dodge 5–6 down

lead and dodge
dodge 3–4 up

5–6 places up
treble bob at the back

treble bob at the front
3–4 places up

dodge 5–6 up
backwork
dodge 5–6 down

3–4 places down
treble bob at the front

treble bob at the back
5–6 places down

dodge 3–4 down
dodge and lead

dodge 5–6 up
dodge 1‑and‑2 at the back

dodge 3–4 down
frontwork

And we can use this inform­a­tion to con­struct a nice table show­ing a single lead end of Cam­bridge Sur­prise Major. This table is con­struc­ted by select­ing a bell, e.g. the 2, and tra­cing its course through a lead. The 2 begins in the middle of the front­work (hav­ing just made 2nds over the treble, so to speak), just as in Cam­bridge Minor. At the end of the lead the 2 ends up in 6th place, and so we con­tin­ue by tra­cing the work from the top again as bell 6. At the end of the lead bell 6 becomes the 7th place bell and we con­tin­ue from the top, becom­ing suc­cess­ively the 3rd place bell, 4th place bell, 8th place bell, and finally the 5th place bell, which ends by mak­ing 2nds over the treble in the middle of the front­work, which is where, as the 2nd place bell, we started.

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No doubt I shall find myself con­tinu­ally repeat­ing the order of work over the next week or so, and we shall see next week wheth­er I have learnt it well enough to ring a plain course.

Not that that’s the only dif­fi­culty with ringing Cam­bridge Major. Anoth­er prob­lem I found last week was ropesight, espe­cially when dodging in 5–6. It’s not easy to see 4 or 5 bells below you at this point. Hope­fully, this too is some­thing that will improve with practise.

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