Thinking allowed

calling Bob Minor, and other progress

I finally got to call a touch of Bob Minor last night. Every fourth week a group of oth­er ringers attends our prac­tice, and this extra exper­i­ence is just what a novice caller needs! With a less exper­i­enced ringer on 2, able to ring a plain course but not com­fort­able with bobs, I was able to ring the 5 and call a 120 – home and wrong with 2 as the obser­va­tion bell; or from my own point of view, out, out, wrong, make. And it all worked. No one got ter­ribly lost, and I remembered when to call the bobs, and was even able to tell anoth­er ringer to make the bob and then to dodge 5–6 down with the 2, and then to dodge 5–6 up with me.

Else­where, I went to a Fri­day prac­tice at ten-bell St Neots a week or so ago. I had rung there once before, at a dis­trict meet­ing, and went this time because I had a friend stay­ing overnight and he’s a ringer. We watched them ring a course of Glas­gow on 8 – way bey­ond my cap­ab­il­it­ies! But I did get to ring Grand­sire Caters (i.e. on 9 bells with a ten­or cov­er) and did not dis­grace myself. My ropesight could just about man­age with the extra bells, and I am just about com­fort­able enough with Grand­sire to man­age being affected by the bobs and singles.

Still not had anoth­er chance to ring Cam­bridge Major though. 

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calling other touches

I’ve been call­ing Bob Doubles for some time now, and have become reas­on­ably com­pet­ent at it, espe­cially if the oth­er ringers are com­pet­ent too. But my own band is not always as good as that, and so I have found myself try­ing to see what oth­er bells are doing or should be doing, so that I can try to put them right. One of the side effects of this is that, if you are not care­ful, you start ringing what the bell you are think­ing of is doing, rather than what you should be doing! That’s almost guar­an­teed to ruin a touch that you are try­ing to call. Still, it is good prac­tice to be able to observe anoth­er ringer, and obvi­ously help­ful to a band if I can help anoth­er ringer com­plete a touch.

I have also been think­ing about learn­ing to call oth­er touches. At our own tower on a Sunday morn­ing we mostly get to ring Bob Doubles, but we are almost at the stage of hav­ing enough Plain Bob ringers to be able to ring Bob Minor, and it might be help­ful to be able to call touches of that.

In Bob Minor, the vari­ations from plain hunt­ing are: dodge 3–4 down, 5–6 down, 5–6 up, 3–4 up, and make 2nds. A bob is like a bob in Doubles: run out, run in, or make the bob. If you make the bob, then next time you dodge 5–6 down and carry on from there (where­as in Doubles you would do four blows behind next time, but of course that doesn’t occur in Minor). If you are dodging 5–6 down or 5–6 up then you are unaf­fected by a bob.

In Bob Doubles there are four call­ing pos­i­tions. i.e. places at which you can call a bob:

  • ‘out’ when you run out, rather than mak­ing 2nds place
  • ‘in’ when you run in, rather than dodging 3–4 down
  • ‘make’ or ‘bob’ when you make the bob, rather than dodging 3–4 up
  • ‘home’ when you are mak­ing four blows at the back, and you are unaffected

In Bob Minor there are five call­ing pos­i­tions: ‘out’, ‘in’ and ‘make’ are the same as in Doubles. The two new ones are:

  • ‘home’ when you are about to dodge 5–6 down, and are unaffected
  • ‘wrong’ when you are about to dodge 5–6 up, and are unaffected

A simple touch in Bob Minor is to call bobs when you are dodging 5–6 down or 5–6 up and are there­fore unaf­fected. If you do this four times, then it should come back to rounds at the appro­pri­ate point. If you are ringing the 6, then this means call­ing the fol­low­ing: wrong, home, wrong, home (and imme­di­ately that is rounds after the last bob). On 2, 3, 4 or 5 it is: home, wrong, home, wrong (which on the 5 is rounds imme­di­ately after the last bob, but on 2, 3 or 4 there are more leads before get­ting back to rounds). The dif­fer­ence is because on the 6 you reach the 5–6 up dodging pos­i­tion before the 5–6 down, where­as on the oth­er bells you reach 5–6 down first.

That’s all very well if you are going to be the bell unaf­fected by the bobs. But in a band which has only just reached the num­ber of ringers to try Bob Minor rather than Bob Doubles, it is bet­ter for the most inex­per­i­enced ringer to be the one who is unaf­fected by the bobs, rather than the caller. This ringer is quite likely to be ringing bell 2, so we need to call this touch (home, wrong, home, wrong) from the point of view of bell 2, whichever bell the caller is ringing; i.e., we must make bell 2 the obser­va­tion bell.

We can do this by watch­ing bell 2 and call­ing a bob whenev­er it is about to dodge 5–6 down or 5–6 up; but it is prob­ably easi­er for the novice caller to work out in advance when this ought to occur and remem­ber what their own pos­i­tion is at the cor­res­pond­ing point.

So, this is the order of work that bell 2 will do:

  1. dodge 3–4 down
  2. dodge 5–6 down
  3. dodge 5–6 up
  4. dodge 3–4 up
  5. make seconds
    and repeat.

So we need to call a bob at the end of the second lead, and the end of the third lead, and then again at the end of the sev­enth lead and the end of the eighth lead.

Now we need to work out what our own bell will be doing. Sup­pose we are ringing bell 5. Then we will do the fol­low­ing work:

  1. dodge 3–4 up
  2. BOB: run out (rather than mak­ing seconds)
  3. BOB: run out (rather than mak­ing seconds)
  4. make seconds
  5. dodge 3–4 down
  6. dodge 5–6 down
  7. BOB: dodge 5–6 up (unaf­fected)
  8. BOB: make the bob (rather than dodge 3–4 up)
  9. dodge 5–6 down
  10. dodge 5–6 up (which is rounds)

What you have to remem­ber is the touch: out, out, wrong, make.

There is one fur­ther issue that comes to mind — when to actu­ally say the word ‘bob’. This should be done at the back­stroke lead before the treble leads, a whole pull’s notice of the dodge itself. For an out bob, this is when you are ringing the back­stroke as you lead, and for make it is as you ring a back­stroke in 3rd place (or just frac­tion­ally before). But for home it needs to be called at the back­stroke lead before your own back­stroke in 6th place, which is imme­di­ately after you have rung your pre­vi­ous blow, the hand­stroke in 6th place. For the wrong bob, the call should be between your hand­stroke in 4th place and the back­stroke in 5th place — a little earli­er rather than later, since that is when the bell which will run out is mak­ing its back­stroke lead.

That’s enough to keep us busy for a while I think, espe­cially if the caller is try­ing to ensure that anoth­er bell is in the right place. On that top­ic, more anon.

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Ringing Cambridge Major

It’s four weeks since I star­ted try­ing to learn Cam­bridge Sur­prise Major. I reck­on I have the ‘blue line’ fairly well mem­or­ized — in the­ory. But put­ting it into prac­tice is not so easy.

In the first place, actu­ally get­ting enough oth­ers who can ring Cam­bridge Major is itself quite hard. Of the four prac­tices since I began, at two of them there have not been enough exper­i­enced ringers to even try Cam­bridge Major. At the oth­er two it has just about been pos­sible to find 6 oth­er ringers cap­able of Cam­bridge plus one who can treble bob on the treble.

But on each of these two occa­sions we have man­aged to get about half way through a plain course before it goes hor­ribly wrong. The annoy­ing thing from my per­spect­ive is that this has not been my fault, but mis­takes by oth­er ringers. Both times, I have been ringing bell 2, the first time with anoth­er ringer stand­ing behind me, and each time, as I was com­plet­ing the back­work some of those ringing in front of me have got mixed up. Sigh. I’m not blam­ing them — it’s a reas­on­ably hard meth­od after all. But it is frus­trat­ing when I am try­ing to learn the meth­od myself.

Next week is Ash Wed­nes­day, so it’ll be anoth­er couple of weeks before I can try again.

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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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quarter peal, aged 9 1/4

A year which has seen, for me, three failed quarter peal attempts has drawn to a close with a suc­cess­ful quarter peal on the last day of the year. This was my third quarter peal, and the second in which I have rung ‘inside’, but the not­able thing about this one is that it was the first for the treble, Adam, who is aged just 9. We rang 1260 changes of Plain Bob Doubles, and apart from a glitch in the middle when I almost lost my place, was gen­er­ally unevent­ful. A nice way to end the year, and tonight we shall ring in the New Year at mid­night – a good way to start 2006.

On Sat­urday morn­ing, 31 Decem­ber 2005, at the Church of Saint James, Hem­ing­ford Grey, Cam­bridge­shire, a Quarter Peal of 1260 Plain Bob Doubles was rung in 49 minutes. 
Weight of Ten­or: 11–2‑13 1/2 in G# 
*Adam Saf­ford Treble Simon Ker­shaw 4
Steph­en M White 2 Michael V White 5
D Tom Cruyfft 3 Robin Saf­ford 6
Con­duc­ted by Michael V White
* First Quarter Peal, at age of 9 years
Rung on the con­duct­or’s 70th birthday
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Simon's Tip for Stedman

I’ve been ringing Sted­man for about a year now, and can gen­er­ally keep my place — even in touches of Triples. I was quite pleased with myself last night because I was able to put right anoth­er ringer. I had dodged 6–7 up with him, and then when I star­ted to dodge 6–7 down he was still hanging around in 6–7. ‘4–5 down now, M,’ I called, and then a dodge or so later, since I thought he still wasn’t sure where he was, ‘Down to the front, now.’ I had to phrase it that way because I had no idea wheth­er he should have gone in quick or slow. But at least it kept the ringing going, and we man­aged to com­plete the touch.

That got me think­ing, how­ever, about how to know wheth­er to go in quick or slow in Sted­man, a per­en­ni­al prob­lem for Sted­man ringers. Steve Cole­man calls it Stedman’s Greatest Prob­lem, and offers a num­ber of tips for remem­ber­ing or work­ing out wheth­er, after you have dodged 4–5 down, you should go in as a slow bell or a quick bell.

One of the sug­ges­ted tips is to use your feet, mov­ing one foot for­ward if you go out quick, and then when you are about to go in, look­ing at your feet and remem­ber­ing that this foot (or is it the oth­er foot?) means some­thing or oth­er. And if a bob is called you have to remem­ber to swap which foot is forward.

But if you are going to put anoth­er bell right then you want to know wheth­er each six is a quick six or a slow six, not just the one where you go down to the front three. What you need to do, then, is to keep track of each six as you ring, or at least as you double-dodge your way to the back and down again.

My first idea was that as you do each double dodge you think, as a back­ground thought: ‘this is a quick six’ or ‘this is a slow six’. But it can be quite hard to keep this in mind — you need to keep it rather near­er the front than the back.

So, this is what I came up with, though I haven’t had a chance to put it into prac­tice yet. I don’t claim any great ori­gin­al­ity for it, but it seems to me to be suf­fi­ciently simple to cope with all cases, and with as many bobs as may be called.

All it entails is that as you count your place when double-dodging up to the back and down again, you append to each pos­i­tion the word ‘quick or ‘slow’. The same word will apply through­out the six blows of a double dodge, and when you move to the next double dodge you swap to the oth­er word.

So, if you have gone out slow, then you would count:

4th quick, 5th quick; 4th quick, 5th quick; 4th quick, 5th quick;
and then
6th slow, 7th slow; 6th slow, 7th slow; 6th slow, 7th slow;
7th quick, 6th quick; 7th quick, 6th quick; 7th quick, 6th quick;
5th slow, 4th slow; 5th slow, 4th slow; 5th slow, 4th slow;
and so go in quick.

If a bob (or a single) is called then you simply move onto the next six:

6th slow, 7th slow; 6th slow, 7th slow; ‘BOB!’ 6th slow, 7th slow;
6th quick, 7th quick; 6th quick, 7th quick; 6th quick, 7th quick;
7th slow, 6th slow; 7th slow, 6th slow; 7th slow, 6th slow;

and you have auto­mat­ic­ally kept track of what’s going on.

And not only have you kept track so that you will know what to do when you arrive at the front, but you also at any stage know wheth­er a bell going in should go in quick or slow too. So you have more chance of being able to put them right.

Wheth­er this works in prac­tice remains to be seen. One pos­sible dif­fi­culty is the tongue-twist­ing nature of some of these phrases. But you don’t actu­ally have to say them aloud or par­tic­u­larly accur­ately — just good enough not to get lost. Stay tuned!

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finally ringing Cambridge Surprise

So finally, some two months after it was sug­ges­ted that I go away and learn Cam­bridge Sur­prise Minor, my chance to try ringing it arrives.

After sev­er­al months away, my ringing teach­er is now back, and Wed­nes­day prac­tices at Hem­ing­ford Grey (which we some­times struggled to main­tain in his absence) are once again more com­plex evenings.

Tonight I walked into the ringing cham­ber: there were 6 oth­er ringers, about to ring Bob Doubles for someone still learn­ing the meth­od. ‘Right, we’ll ring Bob Minor instead,’ the cap­tain said, and pro­ceeded to call a touch. I was slightly taken by sur­prise at the first lead end, because I had been expect­ing a plain course, when he called a Bob. Anoth­er ringer arrived, and with eight present we rang a touch of Grand­sire Triples. This went quite well, but some­where along the line the cap­tain and I swapped places, pre­sum­ably when we were dodging and he was telling me what to do.

Then, after some oth­er ringing, ‘We’ll ring a touch of Kent next.’ Hasty revi­sion of what hap­pens at a bob in Kent. If you’re com­ing out of the slow or going into the slow you are unaf­fected; if you are just mak­ing 3rds & 4ths up for the second time, then imme­di­ately add 4ths and 3rds (so you make 4 blows in 4ths) — this is places down the first time. And if you are at the back then add anoth­er double dodge in the place where you are already dodging. I rang bell 4, so made an extra blow in 4th place and 2 in 3rds — 4ths & 3rds down the first time. Then at the next lead end: ‘Bob!’. I was just mak­ing places down the second time, so I was unaf­fected and went into the slow work at the front. And as I came out of the slow, dodging with the treble, anoth­er bob was called, and again I was unaf­fected, mak­ing places up. So we car­ried on, mak­ing places up the second time, and then ‘Bob!’, so just about to imme­di­ately do places down, but instead ‘That’s all!’ and we had rung three leads of Kent.

Again after a bit more ringing, we turned to Cam­bridge. I offered to ring the treble, and then added ‘I’d like to have a go ringing inside after­wards’. And so it came to my turn to try Cam­bridge Sur­prise. I chose to ring the 3, and the treble was rung by someone just learn­ing to treble bob. We set off: I did the back­work, and Cam­bridge places down, dodged in 1–2, up to the back, dodge 5–6 up and double-dodge 5–6 down, and down to the front­work. And as I made 2nds in the middle of the front­work, it was clear that some­thing had gone wrong, and the treble was lost, and ‘rounds’ was called. We tried again, this time put­ting an exper­i­enced ringer on the treble, and the per­son who had been stand­ing behind the treble came and stood behind me, but we went wrong even quick­er this time. Again it hadn’t been my fault, and we tried again. Back­work, places down, dodge and lead, one and two at the back, front­work (con­cen­trate, con­cen­trate), two and one at the back, lead and dodge, places up (is he going to call a bob?!), ‘That’s all!’. We had made it, and I had rung Cam­bridge Sur­prise Minor at essen­tially the first attempt.

My mind­er made two com­ments: that clearly, I had learnt the meth­od; and that it was a good job I had not missed the sally or I would surely have broken the stay. This was a com­ment on the brute force with which I had been ringing and con­trolling the rope. And it was true, I had been pulling hard and check­ing the rope at slmost every stroke in order to keep my place. I can remem­ber that when I first learnt to ring I would use this brute force tech­nique to ring the ten­or, but it’s not some­thing I have done much since acquir­ing bet­ter bell con­trol. Must try and do bet­ter next time.

All in all a pretty action-packed prac­tice night.

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Three leads of Kent

Last Sat­urday was the monthly bell­ringers’ dis­trict meet­ing. I’ve not been to one of these before (though I had inten­ded to go to last month’s), but this time it was at Bluntisham, whose bells have only just been rehung so that they can be rung and only a couple of miles down the road. Bluntisham is where Dorothy L Say­ers spent her child­hood, and where her fath­er, the Revd Henry Say­ers, was Rect­or a cen­tury ago. It was here that she watched an earli­er res­tor­a­tion of the Bluntisham bells, though not one that enabled them to be rung. Per­haps this stuck in her memory when she came to write her mas­ter­piece, The Nine Tail­ors. In that book, Lord Peter Wim­sey, super­hero, takes part in a 9 hour peal of Kent Treble Bob Major. And so Kent was to be the ‘spe­cial meth­od’ at this meet­ing. And as I have had a couple of attempts at ringing Kent I thought that I would have anoth­er go.

The bells have been hung lower in the tower than before, in order to reduce the strains in the tower, and ringing is from the ground floor. When I arrive, the bells have just been rung up and are ringing mer­rily. Inside the church they seem very loud — you’d want to wear ear plugs if you were ringing a peal. A lot of people have gathered for the meet­ing, from some of the new begin­ners try­ing to form a band for the Bluntisham tower, through to exper­i­enced ringers. Some people have come from around the coun­try to ring these ‘new’ bells — very few people will have rung them before — from Worcester­shire and oth­er far-flung places. That’s a day trip to spend half an hour ringing at Bluntisham before it’s time to head home!

The ringing altern­ates between Kent and oth­er meth­ods, such as a touch of Bob Major, and sim­pler ringing, includ­ing rounds and call changes. I stand around, listen­ing and watch­ing (and talk­ing to oth­er ringers as I am try­ing to arrange a band to ring on Wed­nes­day). Even­tu­ally, the lead­er looks at me and says, ‘You haven’t rung yet, what do you want to try?’ ‘I’d like to have a go at Kent,’ I reply. ‘In the­ory I can ring it.’

So we ring ‘three leads of Kent’, a shortened form of Kent in which a bob is called at each lead end so that it comes back to rounds after just three leads. I had nev­er rung bobs in Kent, but I had done my home­work before going to the meet­ing. Once again I chose to ring on bell 6, which with hind­sight was per­haps not the most inter­est­ing bell to ring. At each lead end a bob was called and instead of mak­ing Kent places down (4ths then 3rds) I did an extra two dodges in 5–6 down. If I had chosen the 4, then at the first lead end I would have been unaf­fected by the bob and would have gone into the slow (mak­ing 2nds place over each of the oth­er bells in turn), and at the second lead end I would have come out of the slow and, again unaf­fected by the bob, made 3rds and 4ths up, and then at the the third lead end made 3rds and 4ths up again (which is rounds).

I quickly found that the ropes were rather long, and I had to move my hands fur­ther up the rope, so that I had per­haps 15 inches of the tail end below my hands. This is not ideal, as I kept get­ting smacked in the face by it, and I could still have done with tak­ing in a bit more. If I had known this before I star­ted then I could have tied a knot in the rope, or tucked the tail end up on my little fin­ger. But as it was it reduced my con­trol over the bell.

I think the best that could be said was that I didn’t get lost, that I knew exactly what I was meant to be doing, and that I didn’t need the instruc­tions from the expert ringers around me — ‘lead now’, ‘dodge with me now’, and so on, help­ful though such com­ments are. But I clearly need to con­cen­trate on my strik­ing: that is, on mak­ing the bell sound in exactly the right place. Although I didn’t get lost in this meth­od, that doesn’t mean that I was pla­cing my bell just where it should be, and I could tell this from my own hands, and with my ears, listen­ing to the bells as they rung. The oth­er ringers were, of course, much too polite to tell me how bad my ringing was.

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Church Times articles

Over the last few years I have writ­ten a num­ber of pieces which have been pub­lished in the Church Times. These have appeared on their monthly com­put­ing / inter­net pages, and have included reviews and sur­veys of web sites on vari­ous topics.

The most recent of these art­icles is now avail­able on the Church Times web­site: a pre­view of Apple’s new Mac mini com­puter. You can read the art­icle here

[Foot­note, 12 April 2005: Apple today announced that the next ver­sion of Mac OS, Mac OS X 10.4, code-named ‘Tiger’, will be avail­able from 29 April. So, now is the time to go and buy that Mac mini, safe in the know­ledge that you will get the latest ver­sion of the OS. I placed my order for a Mac mini this afternoon!]

Some of the earli­er pieces can be found in this list

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End of an Era

Today marked the end of an era for ringing in Saint Ives. This after­noon saw the funer­al of Les Fish­er. He was a small child when, in March 1918, the tower of Saint Ives church was hit by an aero­plane.

The pilot was killed, and amongst much oth­er dam­age, the bell wheels and frames were smashed, the bells them­selves fall­ing to the bel­fry floor. It was over 12 years before the bells were ringable again — apart from rebuild­ing the spire and repair­ing all the dam­age to the church, it was decided to place the bells lower in the tower than before, at the level which had pre­vi­ously been the ringing cham­ber, and to ring the bells from the ground floor of the church. In addi­tion the bells were melted down and recast as a some­what light­er set of eight. Not until Septem­ber 1930 was the new ring ded­ic­ated by the Bish­op of Ely.

It was around this time that Les Fish­er learnt to ring, and just a few years later, in 1935, he became a mem­ber of the Ely Dio­ces­an Asso­ci­ation of Church Bell Ringers, remain­ing a mem­ber until his death 70 years later.

Les was for many years the Tower Cap­tain in Saint Ives, main­tain­ing the ringing through the incum­ben­cies of sev­er­al vicars. In 1985 a peal was rung to cel­eb­rate his 50 years mem­ber­ship of the Ely DA, and it had been planned to ring a peal this year to mark the 70th anniversary. Sadly, this peal will instead now be rung to cel­eb­rate his life.

Many ringers were present at today’s funer­al, amongst them George Bon­ham, Chair­man of the Hunt­ing­don Dis­trict of the Ely DA, who cap­tained the ringing before and after the ser­vice. The bells were rung half-muffled, a tra­di­tion­al sym­bol of mourn­ing, and a rather eery sound, in which the hand­strokes sound nor­mally, and the back­strokes as a muffled echo.

Les will be remembered as the back­bone of St Ives ringing over more than half a cen­tury. He will also be remembered as the donor of a mod­el bell, which, with a mod­el frame added by Bob King, enables us to demon­strate how a bell moves when it is rung. At the moment this mod­el is not on dis­play, but we hope to provide a suit­able table and pro­tect­ive case so that it can be left on gen­er­al view, both to encour­age an interest in ringing, and also as a memori­al to Les Fisher.

May he rest in peace!

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