I Was A Ringer Once

Unlikely as it seems, I once learnt how to ring bells in my local church.

I was never a churchgoer, but I lived in a housing co-operative in East London close to Bow Church.

Not the one that makes you a Cockney if you are born within the sound of its bells, that is the church of St Mary Atte Bow, which is in the City of London itself.

The Church where we lived was a beautiful old church, with a fine set of bells.

I was invited to join a group of ringers that called itself the USSR, the Union of Socialist Secular Ringers.

As with many Churches in the UK, there was a decent Public House nearby, and in some respects my joining this group of ringers was as much an excuse for a social evening at the pub. We would always retire to the pub after a couple of hours learning how to ring the bells.

Bell Ringing is an extraordinary pursuit to master, perhaps for the simple fact that it involves controlling a bell which can weigh several tons, but which is carefully balanced within a wooden frame.

And thus, the main skill is to learn how to pull the bell from its point of balance, maintain control of its swing within its frame, and thus enable the clapper to strike the bell at the right point in its swing, and thereafter return the bell to its point of balance ready to commence another Ring of Bells.

There is a small wooden strop piece against which the bell will rest just so that it can be pulled gently into its swing, and giving the bell just too much momentum can cause this wooden stop to be broken so that the ringer could in theory be pulled out into the bell tower if they kept hold of the rope.

So, bell-ringing is very much a Zen-like activity, finding a means of balancing something that is much heavier than a person, and giving it just sufficient momentum to keep it swinging, and in a manner so that the individual bells, which are of course tuned to different pitches, will strike in the right order.

We often practiced with simple handbells to learn specific rhythms, but the practical art of controlling a bell was the main part of mastering bell-ringing.

I am sure it is quite common for a secular group of people to be involved with ringing the bells in a particular church, just as in William Golding's novel The Spire the workmen constructing the spire of the Cathedral Church in Salisbury, not named as such in the novel, but Golding was an English Teacher at a school in Salisbury, and this was clearly his inspiration for the story.

I met Golding once, when I was about 17, and studying The Spire for my English A-level. It so happened that in my school on the south coast my English Teacher had been taught by Golding, and he simply invited the author to come to our school, and to speak to a group of students about his novel.

I remember he arrived in a fabulous old Jaguar, red in color, just the same model as the kind of Jaguar that Inspector Morse drove in his television series.

This would have been about 1977, and I don't remember much about the detail of the session, although I think I must have enjoyed it enormously. Golding looked exactly like the successful author he had by then become, and although he taught English for some years after the publication of his most successful story, Lord Of The Flies, by the time I met with him he had retired from teaching, and was no doubt writing full-time.

I remember that in his novel, the spire builders were very much of the ‘old religion’, and the contrast between the driven Deacon of the Church and the Masons constructing the edifice was tangible.

Thus I learned the rudiments of bell-ringing, and never attended church once.

But this didn't stop our enthusiasm for learning about the relationship between a man and a bell. And the world inside a bell-tower in an old church is an extraordinarily fascinating one, and the group was fascinating too.