Church Bells

It’s early evening, the windows are open and from across the river the sounds of church bells are drifting into my room as I start this blog. It's no coincidence as I know that tonight is practice night for the bell ringers in the tower.

About ten years ago I was given the opportunity to interview the Captain and team responsible for the lovely sound I’m hearing at the moment. Before I went up the stairs to the tower I hadn’t known the correct term for the people involved. I knew the term campanologist and had done some background work but it turned out to be a whole new world up there.

For a start there is a Captain in charge of the bell ringing team and is usually one of the more experienced members. In this particular church there is a dedicated band of bell-ringers made up of people with many levels of expertise and experience, who all give their time and talent on an entirely voluntary basis to ring for services.

They ring the bells in what is called change ringing which was invented in the 1500s. This style of bell-ringing is a mix of mild exercise, team-work, and mental challenges. They currently have 21 members ranging in age from teenagers to over 80.

To give a flavour of this typical older church here is a brief history:
First mention of bells at ...is in the Inventory of Church Goods (1552), which credits the Church with “thre bells…ij sacring bells”. Sacring bells were - and in many church still are - used during the Communion service. But the two that were at ...were probably little used after the reformation and in 1636 seem to have been given to the Minister as payment for looking after the Church clock.

In 1712 there were four bells in the tower. They were than recast into a ring of five...The five new bells were hung in a frame with space for another bell to be added later...The additional bell arrived in 1858.

The frame was strengthened and enlarged in 1926. One bell was recast, the other five retuned, and two more added to make an octave. These operations were carried out by the Whitechapel foundry, who also hung the bells on ball bearings to make ringing easier. The same foundry recast the entire octave in 1965, so that the Church continues to have a ring of bells that measure up to the glowing reputation that the bells have had since the 18th century.

I mentioned Change Ringing above and this where it gets a bit complicated. It has been described as both an art and a science, the former referring to the handling and control of the moving bell via a rope, and the latter to learning “method” ringing – the production of “bell music”.

This type of bell ringing originated in England in the 16th and 17th century when church bells were first fitted with a full wheel and swung until balanced upside down (see diagram above). The bells are swung 360° using a rope with one ringer per bell. The rope runs round the wheel and hangs down into the ringing chamber below. Each rope has a coloured woolly part called a sally which is where the ringer catches the rope. Using the rope the ringer can control the timing of their bell. This allows the sequence in which the bells ring to be altered and, with practice, continuously evolving sequences of bells to be rung.

The Captain showed me one of the patterns they use and it was baffling (see the image below). The maximum number of different changes that can be rung on five bells is 120, on six bells it is 720, on seven 5,040 and on eight is 40,320. The term Peal which is where more than 5000 changes are rung. This takes, on average, about 3½ hours to ring. Also Quarter Peals are rung regularly which consist of at least 1250 changes and takes 50-55 minutes.

If you’re interested in becoming a Bell Ringer there is the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers which is the representative body for all who ring bells in the English tradition with rope and wheel. You can find them at https://cccbr.org.uk.

By the way, and completely irrelevant to the above, I’m addicted to the Golden Age of detective fiction in the UK. One of the best writers was Dorothy L. Sayers and one of her best books was The Nine Tailors. If you read the book there is actually a point to that statement.

As for the poem I’m going down to Dorset and Thomas Hardy.

Inscriptions For A Peal of Eight Bells After a Restoration

I Thomas Tremble new-made me
Eighteen hundred and fifty-three
Why he did I fail to see.

II I was well-toned by William Brine
Seventeen hundred and twenty-nine
Now recast, I weakly whine!

III Fifteen hundred used to be
My date, but since they melted me
’Tis only eighteen fifty-three

IV Henry Hopkins got me made
And I summon folk as bade
Not to much purpose, I’m afraid!

V I, likewise, for I bang and bid
In commoner metal than I did
Some of me being stolen and hid.

VI I, too, since in a mould they flung me
Drained my silver, and rehung me
So that in tin-like tones I tongue me

VII In nineteen hundred, so ’tis said,
They cut my canon off my head
And made me look scalped, scraped and dead.

VIII I’m the peal’s tenor still, but rue it!
Once it took two to swing me through it.
Now I’m rehung, one dolt can do it.

                                          Thomas Hardy ('Human Shows...' 1925)

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to leave a comment. Terry Q.

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Cliffhanger

I write as someone who knows about the effects of cliffhangers on a person’s life. I was an Archer’s addict. How many Sunday mornings were ruined by the need to listen to the omnibus edition to find out what was happening in Ambridge. I thought of this immediately when I came to start writing this article. Then I wondered why I would think of the term cliffhanger. Where did the word come from? I think I’ve found out where the term first appeared in print but I’ll leave it until the end of the piece....

Surprisingly, the use of the technique has been around for many years. They were used as literary devices in several works of the Middle Ages. The Arabic literary work One Thousand and One Nights involves Scheherazade narrating a series of stories to King Shahryār for 1,001 nights, with each night ending on a cliffhanger in order to save herself from execution. Some medieval Chinese ballads like the Liu chih-yuan chu-kung-tiao ended each chapter on a cliffhanger to keep the audience in suspense.

Cliffhangers became prominent with the serial publication of narrative fiction, pioneered by Charles Dickens. Printed episodically in magazines, Dickens's cliffhangers triggered desperation in his readers. Writing in the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum captured the anticipation of those waiting for the next instalment of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop; in 1841, Dickens fans rioted on the dock of New York Harbour, as they waited for a British ship carrying the next instalment, screaming, "Is little Nell dead?"

On Dickens’ cliffhangers - first seen with The Pickwick Papers in 1836—Leslie Howsam in The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (2015) writes, "It inspired a narrative that Dickens would explore and develop throughout his career. The instalments would typically culminate at a point in the plot that created reader anticipation and thus reader demand, generating a plot and sub-plot motif that would come to typify the novel structure."

With each new instalment widely anticipated with its cliffhanger ending, Dickens’ audience was enormous (his instalment format was also much more affordable and accessible to the masses, with the audience more evenly distributed across income levels than previous). The popularity of Dickens's serial publications saw the cliffhanger become a staple part of the sensation serials by the 1860s.

Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes (which was published in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873) used the term when Henry Knight, one of the protagonists, is left hanging off a cliff.

Moving forward to the start of the film industry during the 1910s, Fort Lee, New Jersey was a centre of production, the cliffs facing New York and the Hudson River were frequently used as locations. For instance films such as The Perils of Pauline were made which would often end suddenly leaving actress Pearl White's Pauline character literally hanging from a cliff. But The Perils of Pauline would have been called a “serial” or “chapter play,” not a cliffhanger.

And here is the big reveal:

The word seems to have been first printed in the January 1931 edition of Variety according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But the Variety article certainly implies that the term cliffhanger was well known at the time. So, I suppose the question is at what point does a word become, well, a word?  I’ll have another look and if you read again next month who knows...

Another attempt at a haiku:

cliff walk past
fields of autumn gold
a gun fires

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Creeping On Midnight

Quick, it's creeping on midnight and I've a Saturday blog to write. Topic? Revenant...

Bloody hell! Get out of that one! No - wait, that's actually it, isn't it? Phew, lucky strike. Getting out of hell, bloody or otherwise and returning to whatever - that's the very essence of revenance, surely. (Checks dictionary just to make sure: one returned from the dead or from exile - probably French in origin...that figures!)

So what do we make of that?

Are we thinking reincarnation? Apparently it's making a comeback: "Life's a bitch and then you die get to do it all over again!" The Buddhist wheel and all that jazz.

Or zombies? Cue a plug for Zombieland (2009, directed by Ruben Fleischer), the funniest and my favourite zombie movie, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin and Bill Murray (as himself).

Or the exile angle? Two of my favourite books are Homer's 'Odyssey' and Hardy's 'Return Of The Native' - and I've returned to both of them on more than one occasion. Highly recommended.

Or the tale of the time I gate-crashed the prestigious Revenant of the Year awards? The late and the great were gathered together on a night of high anxiety and I, the quick among the dead, was passing through this throng of wraiths, trying to get to the heart of the action but wary of the Groke. Just as I was pressing forward to see who was commanding all the attention on the grey carpet, who was leading the ghostly parade, the first rays of the rising sun fingered the palace of dust, and  methought it was time to move smartly on.

Quick. Today's poem, it's a little something not precisely on theme - return from the dead or from exile - but making a comeback (for want of anything else) from my early pages and descriptive of that death-in-life sensation bordering on near paralysis that can sometimes be induced from a too rigorous pursuit of the recreational...

Low
I'm closed in
with dank flowers
in a rank corner.

The sun,
my only mourner,
has fled to bed
leaving moonlight magic
to raise its silver head.

I'm sunk so low
I might be dead
or damned at best
to lie forever
at infernal rest.

Thanks for reading. Have an invigorating week, S ;-)

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