15th March 2018 - That Rings a Bell

Thought for the day:"I wrote a song about tortilla - well it’s a rap really"

I know it is the Ides of March - but I have discussed that event before so I will move swiftly on to the subject of Bells - and the news that on this day in 1940 Hermann Goering decided that 200 Church bells was more than enough for Germany and decided to melt the rest down and smelt them for weapons...

I started as a Campanologist in my early teens, any younger and I probably would not have been able to manage the weight of the bells, though it is clearly true that technique is everything - otherwise no-one would be able to manage the larger bells weighing many hundredweight.

Christ Church Radlett

I recall Radlett as having the smallest peal in the country - the Tenor (lowest bell) weighing in at less than one hundredweight. My local Church, St Mary's in Edgware, had a treble (the lightest bell) weighing in at just under 2 hundredweight and the tenor was a good 9 or ten hundredweight.

St Margaret's Edgware

I knew little of other themes in bellringing - other than the normal cacophany which its the usual European answer to the call to prayer but had heard of Carrillion.


The carillon is a collection of tuned bells for playing conventional melodic music. The bells are stationary and struck by hammers linked to a clavier keyboard.

Carillonneur in action

The instrument is played sitting on a bench by hitting the top keyboard that allows expression through variation of touch, with the underside of the half-clenched fists, and the bottom keyboard with the feet, since the lower notes in particular require more physical strength than an organ, the latter not attaining the tonal range of the better carillons: for some of these, their bell producing the lowest tone, the 'bourdon', may weigh well over 8 tonnes; other fine bells settle for 5 to 6 tonnes. A carillon renders at least two octaves for which it needs 23 bells, though the finest have 47 to 56 bells or extravagantly even more, arranged in chromatic sequence, so tuned as to produce concordant harmony when many bells are sounded together.
I remember setting up the bells in Edgware so you could play them by pulling on the ropes and causing the hammer to hit the side - We were not very good at it and soon went back to normal Change Ringing.

The carillon in the Church of St Peter, Aberdyfi, Gwynedd, Wales is often used to play the famous 'Bells of Aberdovey' tune. I must go there sometime and see that.

The carillon of Kirk in the Hills, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, United States, along with the one at Hyechon College in Daejoen, South Korea, have the highest number of bells in the world: 77.

A carillon-like instrument with fewer than 23 bells is called a chime. So I suppose what we built in Edgware was a Chime rather than a Carillion. American chimes usually have one to one and a half diatonic octaves. Many chimes play an automated piece of music, such as clock chimes. Chime bells generally used to lack dynamic variation and inner tuning, or the mathematical balance of a bell's complex sound, to permit use of harmony. Since the 20th century, in Belgium and The Netherlands, clock chime bells have inner tuning and produce complex fully harmonized music.

Nope - not a Chime !! I now find that this was what we had in Edgware

The Ellacombe apparatus is an English mechanism devised for chiming by striking stationary bells with external hammers. However it does not have the same sound as full circle ringing due to the absence of the doppler effect derived from bell rotation and the lack of a damping effect of the clapper after each strike.

It requires only one person to operate. Each hammer is connected by a rope to a fixed frame in the bell-ringing room. When in use the ropes are taut, and pulling one of the ropes towards the player will strike the hammer against the bell. To enable normal full circle ringing on the same bells, the ropes are slackened to allow the hammers to drop away from the moving bells.

The system was devised by Reverend Henry Thomas Ellacombe of Gloucestershire, who first had such a system installed in Bitton in 1821. He created the system to make conventional bell-ringers redundant, so churches did not have to tolerate the behaviour of what he thought were unruly bell-ringers.

However, in reality, it required very rare expertise for one person to ring changes. The sound of a chime was a poor substitute for the rich sound of swinging bells, and the apparatus fell out of fashion. Consequently, the Ellacombe apparatus has been disconnected or removed from many towers in the UK. In towers where the apparatus remains intact, it is generally used like a Carillon, but to play simple tunes, or if expertise exists, to play changes.

Change Ringing ..

In English style full circle ringing the bells in a church tower are hung so that on each stroke the bell swings through a complete circle; actually a little more than 360 degrees. Between strokes, it briefly sits poised 'upside-down', with the mouth pointed upwards; pulling on a rope connected to a large diameter wheel attached to the bell swings it down and the assembly's own momentum propels the bell back up again on the other side of the swing. Each alternate pull or stroke is identified as either handstroke or backstroke - handstroke where the "sally" (the fluffy area covered with wool) is pulled followed by a pull on the plain "tail". At East Bergholt in the English county of Suffolk, there is a unique set of bells that are not in a tower and are rung full circle by hand. They are the heaviest ring of five bells listed in Dove's Guide for Church Bell Ringers[6] at 4.25 tons (4,318 kg) in total.

These rings of bells have relatively few bells, compared with a carillon; six or eight-bell towers are common, with the largest rings in numbering up to sixteen bells. The bells are usually tuned to fall in a diatonic scale without chromatic notes; they are traditionally numbered from the top downwards so that the highest bell (called the treble) is numbered 1 and the lowest bell (the tenor) has the highest number; it is usually the tonic note of the bells' scale.

To swing the heavy bells requires a ringer for each bell. Furthermore, the great inertias involved mean that a ringer has only a limited ability to retard or accelerate his/her bell's cycle. Along with the relatively limited palette of notes available, the upshot is that such rings of bells do not easily lend themselves to ringing melodies.

This is a diagram of one type of method ringing. Each bell strikes once in every sequence, or change, and repetition is avoided. Here 1 is the highest-pitched, and 6 is the lowest

Instead, a system of change ringing evolved, probably early in the seventeenth century, which centres on mathematical permutations. The ringers begin with rounds, which is simply ringing down the scale in numerical order. (On six bells this would be 123456.) The ringing then proceeds in a series of rows or changes, each of which is some permutation of rounds (for example 214365) where no bell changes by more than one position from the preceding row (this is also known as the Steinhaus–Johnson–Trotter algorithm).

In call change ringing, one of the ringers (known as the Conductor) calls out to tell the other ringers how to vary their order. The timing of the calls and changes of pattern accompanying them are made at the discretion of the Conductor and so do not necessarily involve a change of ringing sequence at each successive stroke as is characteristic of method ringing. Some ringers, notably in the West of England where there is a strong call-change tradition, ring call changes exclusively but for others, the essence of change ringing is the substantially different method ringing. 

As of 2015 there are 7,140 English style rings. 

The Netherlands, Pakistan, India, and Spain have one each. 

The Windward Isles and the Isle of Man have 2 each. 

Canada and New Zealand 8 each. 

The Channel Isles 10. 

Africa as a continent has 13. 

Scotland 24, Ireland 37, USA 48, Australia 59 and Wales 227. 

The remaining 6,798 (95.2%) are in England (including three mobile rings).

Oh well - that rings a Bell !!

oh and on the subject of the Ides of March