All Saints, Old Glossop

I read the Edington Training School, 2015 post with interest, as a mid-50’s learner myself I’m keen to hear the experiences of others. The bit about stay breaking struck a chord, within the first couple minutes of me being on a bell for the first time, doing just backstroke, the already-twice-repaired slider gave up the ghost and the bell went over on the backstroke, which was … interesting 🙂 It’s left me with an aversion to bouncing off the stay, but I guess that’s not an entirely bad thing! And yes, I agree that joining together handstroke and backstroke is a big leap as you are working at twice the rate and you don’t have the benefit of an experienced hand on the bell to continuously correct any under/over pulled strokes – it’s more than 2x harder than doing handstroke and backstroke separately, I’d say nearer 4x!

I’ve been to three towers so far and received a mix of formal and informal training. One particularly noticeable thing is that the technique and advice I’ve been given has been consistent between all three. All have picked up on the same handling errors, and have told me the same corrections. I think that consistency is something the ringing community should be proud of.

One comment I would make though is that I’ve sometimes felt I’m being asked to correct everything all at once, because “If you get into bad habits you’ll struggle to get out of them”. That’s true enough but I think I’m unlikely to get into permanently bad habits in just one session. Also, you can’t slow bellringing down, so one of the challenges as a learner is dealing with the information overload – I simply can’t concentrate on fixing three things at once whilst also keeping up with the bell. I’d suggest that working on just one aspect of handling at a time is more likely to yield results and less likely to leave the learner feeling frustrated and that they won’t ever “get it”.

I also play percussion, currently as part of a large group (shameless plug) and I started that as a late learner (40) as well. The experience of learning bellringing has lots of similarities with learning to drum, overload being one I’m particularly familiar with! Patience and persistence were the some of the biggest things I had to learn for drumming – as adults we expect to be adept at most of the things we do day to day and being a beginner is something we forget how to do. We tend to get embarrassed and overly apologetic when we make the inevitable mistakes – we have to remember it’s OK not to be perfect straight away. I think those things apply to bellringing as well, I suspect they are more of an obstacle than the other age-related issues that are often given as reasons why oldies take longer.

One thing that’s helped me greatly is having the assistance of two experienced ringers, one actively coaching and the other observing. The coach helps with the major stuff – “Catch the sally higher”, “Pull longer not harder” etc. and the observer picks up the more subtle things. Then after ringing for a while I stand the bell we discuss what the observer noticed. I have time to discuss their feedback, figure out what effect it had on the bell and get advice on how to correct it. Then I ring again with what I need to do already in my head, rather than trying to adjust ‘on the fly’. For me at least and at the stage I’m at, short ‘feedback loops’ seem to work best.

I had my first go last week at ringing rounds as part of a regular tower practice on unmuted bells rather than tied ones which was a whole new level of hard. I tended to slightly under-pull the bell, especially on handstroke and as a result I was ringing too fast and the bell had insufficient energy for me to pause it fractionally at the top if I needed to and keep in time. The rest of the band were very gracious and told me I’d done well, but as someone with a percussion background I thought differently 🙂 One really positive thing is that due to the excellent coaching I’ve received – the “why” as well as the “what” – even at this early stage I have to tools to think about what’s happening as I ring and both explain what I’m struggling with to other ringers and understand the advice I’m given in return. As a later learner that’s particularly helpful.

Another tip I’d give other learners is go along to regular practices and actively watch the band rehearsing – there’s great benefit in absorbing how someone with good bell control flows everything together, how they adjust things to move for a call change, what they are watching and so on. Figuring out who is going where and working out out the striking order of the bells by watching the ropes is also much harder than it might seem. And, although I understand the mechanics of plain hunt, I’m damned if I can follow it at the moment!

Anyway, I’m having great fun with a challenge that’s far harder than it looks at first, many thanks to all the generous people who have helped me so far.