Thinking allowed

towards spliced Surprise

on Saturday, 15 December 2007 at 1.51 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as bellringing, learning new methods

Recently anoth­er tower in the area has held a monthly prac­tice for bud­ding Sur­prise ringers. We’ve been prac­tising Cam­bridge and York­shire with the inten­tion of even­tu­ally ringing them spliced togeth­er, but we’re not quite at that stage yet. Those attend­ing have included a suit­able mix of expert and novice Sur­prise ringers — it would be next to impossible with all novices!

A neces­sary step in spli­cing these meth­ods is to learn what each place bell does, and which place bell it becomes after­wards. For­tu­nately the order in which place bell suc­ceeds place bell is the same in both Cam­bridge and York­shire: 2, 6, 7, 3, 4, 8, 5, and back to 2. In addi­tion the work of the 3rd place bell is identic­al in both meth­ods, and most of the oth­ers start and fin­ish with sim­il­ar bits of work. As usu­al in ringing, what has to be done is to mem­or­ize com­pletely these pieces of work so that they can be instantly recalled and inter­changed, so in an attempt to do so I have set down here, from memory, what each bell has to do in each method.