At St Giles, Sheldon in Birmingham we have been organizing special monthly practices for some time. The main aim of these is to improve our Sunday Service ringing. In August we concentrated on St Simon’s Doubles and are now able to ring a reasonably well-struck plain course. Our recent September practice helped one of our ringers practise the work at bobs for Plain Bob Doubles to help her achieve ringing a touch. At the same practice more experienced ringers rang touches of Reverse Canterbury Doubles.

St Giles, Sheldon

The difference between a Special Practice and an ordinary practice is that everyone commits to coming in the sameway that they would to wedding ringing. This then enables us to invite helpers from nearby towers to provide the necessary support and enable ringers to benefit from having a ‘stander-behind’. They are held on a different night from our usual practices. Having set ourselves personal targets we use Special Practices to help us achieve these. Sometimes we focus on individuals, such as helping someone ring inside to a method; on other occasions we may target the whole team by focusing on something like ringing down in peal. As it requires intense concentration we have a short break for refreshments and a chat. To make it worthwhile it is necessary to plan these practices carefully in advance, but the hard work involved is well rewarded by the sense of achievement that we feel as a tower as a result. Even the best laid plans don’t always go as expected: our recent practice had two out of the three ringers who were keen to practise bobs and singles in Grandsire Doubles calling in sick on the day, one more unable to attend due to working late and another who just failed to show up! However, all was not lost as the remaining learner had three solid Grandsire ringers and a reliable treble ringer so we went ahead without a tenor behind. By the end of the evening the learner had practised all the work at bobs and singles. I and my partner had only previously called half hunt callings for Grandsire, so we were also on a steep learning curve, but due to good preparation we rang a great many short touches and I was able to prompt the learner what work she would do at each bob or single before each one. I had carefully planned to have a ‘stander behind’ but of course this was not possible as we only numbered five. We came away feeling that although the evening did not quite work out as intended it was definitely a very productive evening that we can build on with future practices.Over the course of the last year we have improved our ringing up and down in peal and we are usually able to augment our better-struck Rounds and Called Changes with touches of Doubles methods for Sunday ringing. It is also nice that some members of the congregation have noticed improvements and commented on our ringing.I was encouraged by Phil Ramsbottom (St Martin’s Guild) to begin organising these practices and I am very grateful to Phil for his continuing advice and support. I hope our experience will encourage other towers to organise some Special Practices of their own!

This article first appeared in the January edition of Tower Talk, ART’s free quarterly e-magazine for ringers, with contributions by new ringers.

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