A guide book ‘Die Themse: Geschichten aus zwei Jahrtausenden’,
by Leo G Linder, published in Brunswick (Braunschweig) in 1993,
describes a German couple’s trip up the ThamesValley.
One chapter, titled (in English) ‘Ringers Wanted’, includes a description of a visit to the ringers at St Giles’ Church, Oxford.
This piece gives a vivid and informative impression of how our style of ringing must seem to someone who has never heard of it before - but ringers, especially, will notice a number of technical errors, which we had no opportunity to correct.
The final section of this chapter starts: ‘Ich habe nicht die geringste Ahnung von dem, was mich erwartet, als ich abends am Seiteneingang von St Giles schelle ….’
We asked one of our ringers who was a German teacher what this meant, and he replied ‘I haven’t the slightest idea …..’ So we asked him to go away and learn the language a bit better and then let us have a translation. He very kindly did so, and his translation follows below.
John Pusey, Tower Captain (now - but not then!), St Giles’ Church January 2014
I haven’t the slightest idea of what is awaiting me as I ring the buzzer one evening at the side door of St Giles’ Church. Ringers Wanted ! Bell-ringing – an art, which in every English town makes everyone a most welcome guest! I am very curious.
A young lady opens the door, Rachel Pusey, daughter of the tower-captain. The first thing I learn as I climb up the tower to the ringing chamber is: every English church tower has its tower-captain, the chief and director of the ringers. And then the next thing is: even someone who has been learning for eight months, like the American Professor of Mathematics Dr Gibson, still considers himself a beginner in the art. So tonight I will not be able to learn to ring, but will perhaps be able to understand more about it.
In the dim light of a 40-watt bulb we balance on the beams of the bell-frame housing the eight bells of St Giles. The heaviest of them, the tenor, weighs as much as an average car. They are hung so that they can describe a complete circle. A bell on the continent swings like a children’s swing in a half- or quarter-circle, uncontrolled, left to its own dynamics. Most such bells produce, to English ears, a frightful confusion of double strikes and uneven gaps. The English bell turns a complete circle. Just after it reaches the top of its circle it is stopped by a braking mechanism, so that it remains upside-down until the ringer sets in motion again. In this way, several English bells can be rung accurately together. Since English bells are tuned in an octave, each bell ringing in its place, one hears the most wonderful arrangement in English belfries.
Of course ringers understand their craft. After we had climbed a narrow ladder into the bell-chamber, Miss Pusey explained ‘The art of ringing consists of gently checking the bell just before it reaches the top of its swing so that it does not hit the braking mechanism while in full swing. If the swing is too fast, the wooden brake would break, the bell would swing over with all its weight and rip the rope from the ringer’s hand – it happens so quickly that the ringer can do nothing. If you don’t let go, you travel upwards and are flung against the ceiling – at best ending with grazed hands. Fiona, would you mind showing us your hands?’ Fiona doesn’t mind. Smiling, she shows the scorched stripes on both palms.
‘Ringing’ says Miss Pusey, ‘needs no particular physical strength, but rather skill and feeling. Some of the best ringers in the country are little old ladies.’
Her father, the tower-captain, has arrived; the practice begins. The beginners first practice on hand-bells, the experienced ringers on the bell-ropes which hang down through round holes in the ceiling like ropes on gallows. They practice silently, that is with muffled clappers. Two and a half hours of ringing would, despite peoples’ love of bells, drive neighbours to distraction.
‘What these people here – students, workers, pensioners, and house-wives – will now undertake’, explained Mr Pusey, ‘is called ‘change-ringing’. You must not think of this as the performance of a melody like a carillon. We follow mathematical sequences combined with steady rhythm. As you see, we have eight bells upstairs.
‘Firstly, we ring the octave from top to bottom. And then the bells change their position one after the other within the sequence, while during a change only one bell can change its position. You can imagine that the possible variations on eight bells are unbelievably numerous when always only one bell changes its position. We rang the complete sequence once only; that lasted twenty-one hours ! Only after thirty thousand changes are all the positions exhausted.’ He shows me the diagram of one such sequence – it looked like the output of a mad oscilloscope.
Warming up is over: eight ringers stand in a circle and grasp the bell-ropes with both hands. Straight as a candle, with a stiff back, the first ringer sets his bell into motion with a strong jerk on the command of the tower-captain. A split second later the next bell rings, then the next and so on. A new command from the tower-captain breaks up the scale, continues to break up the changes over the next hour, until ultimately a complicated pattern is produced of bell-sounds which follow after each other in a mathematically precise rhythm.
Since that evening, when I hear the bells ringing out somewhere along the Thames in the early evening, I see the ringers before me, with their stiff backs and determined looks, their powerful and well-measured arm movements preventing the bells from overturning.
This section of the text is accompanied by a picture captioned:
‘This evening at six these knots will be undone by change-ringers’.
It shows a set of ropes gathered together and hanging in loops, beside a gothic window – none of which actually matches the situation at St Giles, so the picture must have been taken somewhere else !
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