Getting Better

I’ve frequently said that it is relatively easy to learn how to handle a bell – in other words, to ring safely at a steady speed –  as long as you have a good tutor and enough time on the rope.  However, this is very much the easy part, because when you are ringing on your own, it doesn’t matter that you haven’t got much control.  It doesn’t matter if the bell sometimes falls back too quickly, or goes over the balance, as long as you can control the rope.  You should ensure that you can ring a bell up and down safely, so that you know what to do when the bell drops.

You need to learn how the bell feels when it is balanced – whether it is pulling over the balance, or dropping back again –  and what to do in either case.  In particular, you need to be confident about holding the bell on the balance at backstroke: when first learning to handle the bell,  most tutors are quite happy that the bell doesn’t quite get to the balance at backstroke, as this means that the stay won’t get bumped.  However, when ringing with others, you may often need to hold the bell up at backstroke.  The best exercise for this is to set the bell at backstroke many times, and to do this until you feel absolutely confident about it. I’m assuming you are already absolutely confident about setting the bell at handstroke!

Whole pull and stand

A fun exercise is ‘Whole Pull and Stand’.  In this exercise, everyone rings rounds and then at the Go, everyone rings a whole pull and then they all stand, except the tenor, which continues to ring at a steady speed.  Everyone pulls off at the next handstroke, and then sets for another whole pull of the tenor.  This is a great exercise and also sounds really nice when done well.

Counting

It is essential for all ringers to listen carefully to their bell.  This is very hard to do when all your attention is taken up with managing the bell and the rope.  The best advice is to count the bells as they strike and to listen to the bell ringing in your position.  Thus, if you are ringing the 3rd, count 1 for the treble, 2 for the second, and when you count 3, that is your bell.  Count the others – 4, 5, 6 as well.  Do this always and whenever you ring.  If this is hard, then your bell is the one that sounds as you catch the sally.  Try to listen to the gap between the bell in front of you and the bell behind you.  You should be exactly half-way between them.  If not, then pull slightly earlier or later as appropriate, remembering that the delay could be different at handstroke and backstroke.

Through constant repetition, it will become second nature to count your place, and this is something that will be a essential when you start to learn method ringing.

Ring facing outwards

One way of forcing people to ring by listening is to get them to stand facing outwards from the ringing circle.  If you have a good band, they should be able to achieve perfect striking, at least in rounds. This is another fun test.

Separating the physical and mental actions

As your ringing improves, you need to find ways of separating the physical action of handling the bell from the mental process of whatever you are ringing.  This helps to ingrain the physical action into the ‘muscle memory’ or autonomous nervous system, thus freeing up the mental process for thinking about what you are ringing.

This can be as simple as asking the learner to call stand after 20 whole pulls.  The learner has to think about counting whole pulls, rather than counting the place or catching the sally at the right time.  Of course, the learner is still listening to where their bell is striking, but it is happening sub-consciously.

Ringing call-changes is another way of developing the muscle memory.  It requires a bit more thinking than calling stand after so many whole pulls, and once the principle of call-changes is grasped, the learner can be asked to call very simple changes, like swapping two bells over.

However, even the simplest method ringing needs some rope-sight.  Call changes are a good way of practising rope-sight, but anything other than the simplest calls are beyond the beginner.

Mexican Wave

One fun exercise that combines several skills is ‘Mexican Wave’.  Here, the

• treble first swaps with the 2, and then back to lead.
• The 2 then immediately swaps with the 3 and back to the treble.
• The 3 then swaps with the 4 and back to the 2.
• The 4 swaps with 5 and back.
• The 5 swaps with 6 and back to rounds.

This requires good bell control and the ability to watch the swaps coming up to you and passing on. Great fun, and needing little brain-power!

You can feel that you are a competent ringer when you have scored your first peal.  It takes skill, concentration, endurance and stamina, to name a few competencies.

Skill

You need to be able to handle your bell properly – never missing the sally, striking the bell accurately, and ringing in rhythm with the other ringers. Not over-pulling so that you get tired and develop blisters. Never deviating from your line and ensuring that you execute the calls cleanly.  This requires a very high level of skill that can take a long time to develop, although like any sort of performance art, you will get there more quickly and easily if you start young.  But you still have to be determined enough to work at it, and to find people better than you are so that you can rise to the challenge each time.

Concentration

Avoid being distracted by strange noises from things you can’t see, or by intrusive thoughts about tasks you need to do, or by physical discomfort: getting too hot or too cold, getting tired or an itchy nose, sore eyes or numb feet.

Endurance

Three hours is a long time to be entirely focussed on one objective.  Time seems to almost stand still. Your feet feel numb, your legs start aching and your hands begin to hurt, especially if you’re getting blisters. but you must not let these distract you.  The best way of doing this is to get ‘in the zone’.  Indeed, this is what I think many ringers are trying to achieve.  Let the rhythm suffuse you.  Listen to the music, and listen out for musical changes.  Feel the rhythm .  If any of you have seen or read about Marina Abramović’s work, you will be aware that she tried to achieve this state through deliberate physical discomfort – such as holding an uncomfortable pose for hours on end.  Ringing is far more productive than that – you are performing and achieving an end product, not simply doing something to or for yourself.  It’s a group activity – you are all in it together.  It’s much more like a marathon race or bike ride.  It isn’t perhaps competitive in quite the same way, but it is still a joint enterprise where you want to be as good as everyone else, or even the best.  Peal ringers are quite exclusive for this reason – they do not want to ring with others who will spoil the end product in some way – by going wrong, or just by imperfect ringing.

This means that it is actually very difficult to achieve a large number of peals – you have to be good enough that other people actually want to ring with you, so that they actually invite you to join them.

Achieving a high peal total

You will never gain a high peal total unless you work at it.  The important thing is to be accepted by a regular peal band.  There are not very many of these although all localities probably have one somewhere.  But they tend not to advertise what they are doing.  I think partly because newbies will inevitably make mistakes, lower the standard of ringing and reduce the success rate.  That ‘s the last thing that can be tolerated by an established band.  On the other hand, you will find it very difficult to set up your own peal band because the limiting factor is having someone to conduct.

Conducting

Conducting requires stamina according to one of my friends who is a leading conductor.  You must not only be able to ring your own bell without conscious effort (this does not mean without effort – just that the effort is being output by the subconscious part of your brain).  You must also be able to ring the method without conscious effort, because all your conscious effort goes into remembering the calling.  Each call must be made at each exact point in the ringing, with a margin of error of around ± 1 second. There may be hundreds of these calls, and you have to check that the other ringers have executed the call correctly and are still on the right lines.  If they have made a mistake, you need to be able to correct them immediately, before they put other people off, and at the same time continue to ring your own bell correctly.  This is immensely difficult.

Is peal ringing enjoyable?

I’ve discussed this with my peal-ringing friends and the general feeling is that the sense of achievement when you have finished is enormous.  During the peal, you have to mentally overcome the difficulties I have mentioned above and this is not easy.

However, there is a great sense of pleasure when the ringing is going well.  I have been lucky enough to ring with some amazingly talented conductors who are not afraid to go for difficult compositions designed to bring out the best music.  This usually means having many calls in complex positions and a band that is not disconcerted by this.  It is hugely pleasurable to ring with such a band.  Of course, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t equally demanding on skills and concentration, but it does mean that all the effort is worth it.

I strongly recommend all ringers to aspire to ring a peal and not to be deterred by what can seem to be an insurmountable object: if you want to do it, you can get there.

This post is for ringers who have passed through the initial stages – they can manage Plain Hunt and want to learn methods.  There are a number of good books that give great advice on how to do this – I especially like Steve Coleman’s series of books, and I would strongly advise ringers to get the one relevant to their level of expertise. In particular, I like

• The Bellringer’s Early Companion; and
• The Method Ringer’s Companion

The Bellringer’s Early Companion has a great deal of help on how to develop your first stages of Change Ringing and there is no point in me trying to re-write this.  It really will save you hours of frustration in the belfry if you get the book and study it.  I appreciate that book-learning has rather gone out of fashion, but ringers are intelligent and will vastly and quickly improve their knowledge and skills if they make the (considerable) effort.  But we are all impatient, so hear are some of my own thoughts on learning change ringing.

Simple methods
Simple methods like Plain Bob and Grandsire can be learnt by thinking of them as Plain Hunting with additional dodges.  You can buy books showing the extra dodges in a ‘circle of work’ – e.g. for Plain Bob Minor this would be 4-3 down, 6-5 down, 5-6 up, 3-4 up, 2nds.  This is fine when you are first trying to move beyond Plain Hunt, but it doesn’t work for anything much more than these basic Plain methods.  Moreover, if you get into the wrong place, it is pretty difficult to get right again.  For example:

• You might know where you should dodge next time, but you have got out of place, so don’t know when that will be.
• You are in the right place, but have forgotten what your last dodge was, so can’t be sure what your next dodge is.

Passing the Treble
The best approach for plain methods is to keep an eye on where (which place) you ring over the treble on your way to the back, as this will tell you your next dodge, although the next dodge will depend on the method you’re ringing, so you will have to learn a different rule for each method.  Take Grandsire Doubles for example.  If you ring over the treble in fifth’s place, you are in the hunt, so keep following the treble down to lead.  If you ring over the treble in fourths place, you dodge 4-5 down; if you ring over the treble in 3rds place, you’re 4-5 up and if the treble takes you from lead, you’re going to make 3rds.

This system extends to Grandsire on any number of bells, although it isn’t as helpful on high numbers, but hopefully your ropesight will have improved so that you’re not needing it as much.  The same system can be used for Plain Bob, although the work is different of course.

Course Bell
The other system is to know and watch your Course Bell.  This is the bell that you follow down to lead (except for the one lead after you have made seconds/thirds in Plain Bob/Grandsire.)  Knowing your course bell is very important, especially on higher numbers of bells.  A common problem for new ringers is making the dodge correctly, but then heading off in the wrong direction.  For example, dodging 4-5 up in Grandsire Triples and then going back to lead.  If you know your course bell, you would realise your error, as you must not return to lead until you have run behind over your course bell.  Also, even if you forget the dodge entirely, you mustn’t overtake your course bell, so you can swan around for a whole pull and come down after your course bell.  Of course, there will be a terrible clatter and a risk of putting others wrong, but if they’re on the ball, they will be able to keep right too.

So, make sure you know your course bell at all times.  In simpler methods, it remains fixed for some time before a bob or single changes it.

Your ‘Duty’
Until the beginning of the 20th Century, this circle of work (or ‘duty’ as the authoritarian Victorians liked to call it) was sufficient for the methods being run by most local Sunday Service bands, but this cumbersome system limited what people could ring.

For example, the book by Sir Arthur Heywood on his new method, Duffield, written in 1888, makes it clear that he thinks it’s difficult. He includes a diagram in which the path of one bell (the tenor) uses bold type. Nowadays that would sufficient to learn the method. However, Sir Arthur goes on to describe the work of each bell in seven pages of text, with hints as to keeping right.  (He expends many pages on Royal and Maximus too.)

However, it is clear from his diagram that  the structure of the method is simple and obvious.  You double-dodge on the back, hunt down to thirds, up to sixths and run through to the front where you double dodge and lead, then reverse this.  I would go as far as to say that it is simpler than St Clement’s College Bob Major, although you do have to become adept at seeing and striking in the right place.  Sir Arthur recognises that less-experienced ringers need help at finding which bells to strike over, and that is what much of the text is about.

Blue Lines
Sir Arthur did show the path of a particular bell in bold type, but he doesn’t really acknowledge that each bell follows this same continuous path, each bell merely starting at a different place along it.

This didn’t really happen until Jasper Snowdon published his revolutionary work ‘Standard Methods’ at the end of the 19th Century.  This contained a set of ‘Diagrams’ in which the Plain Course of each method is laid out in Blue Type with a line through the path of the 2nd bell and a red line through the path of the Treble.

Despite the effort Snowdon put into these Diagrams, he still describes the ‘Duty’ of each bell in exhaustive detail,  and he elaborates on the differences between the successive methods he describes.  The diagrams are merely an adjunct to illustrate the text.

However, ringers soon realised that they could learn the blue line more easily than the exhaustive descriptions of ‘Duty’.  This is partly because there is regularity and symmetry in the blue line, and because the differences between methods become clear.

However, there are some problems if you only know the line – we all experience memory blanks when you suddenly can’t remember where you are, or another bell is crunching with you but you don’t know which of you is wrong.  I’m going to try to give some hints and tips on dealing with these, so that your ringing doesn’t ‘fire out’ in a peal or quarter peal.

Learning those Pesky Blue Lines
Becoming a good method ringer needs two things: the ability to recall the blue line instantly and the ability to see which place you are ringing in.

Let’s deal with the first of these: memorising those pesky blue lines.  You need to find a way of thinking about the lines.  I’ve heard people chanting them out as a series of numbers such as

1 2 1 1 2 2 1 2 1 1 2 1 2 3 4 3 4 5 6 7 8 7 8 7 8 8 7 8 7 6 5 6

Some people may recognise this as the seconds place bell work in Cambridge Major.  Everyone will recognise that it would be desperately easy to lose you way, due to the repetition.

Most ringers would divide this into blocks – the first part is Cambridge Front Work.  Then ‘dodge 3-4, two and one (dodges) on the back, dodge 5-6 down at the lead end’. (This is more-or-less how the work is described in Snowdon’s text.)  You must learn to translate this verbal image into a visual (or aural) pattern in order to be able to ring it.

With this ability, 6th’s place bell becomes ‘lead and dodge up to 5-6 places, dodge behind and become 7ths place bell’.

Likewise, the work of each bell can be distilled into a few words.  We can describe methods far more difficult than ‘Duffield’ quite simply, although you still have to memorise them.

I will expand on this in due course, but why not consult one of the books I’ve mentioned?