One of the things I do for my (ringing) sins is to organise the Thursday morning training sessions at the Edgehill Ringing Centre in Kineton, Warwickshire. We run two sessions of about 75mins each, each with two trainees who take it in turn to ring with a ‘good’ band around them. Of course, this means that I have to find enough helpers to make the sessions possible, and it always helps to have at least a couple of ‘spare’ helpers so that someone is free to talk theory with the trainee who isn’t actually ringing, and so that someone else can take a break from ringing. Sometimes we find that we’ve only just got enough helpers, and sometimes it turns out that all the trainees are learning Plain Bob Doubles. It’s times like that when the helpers start to complain about “Death by Bob Doubles” (although, to be fair, we always try to find a few minutes when the helpers can have a bit of fun, too).

I suppose that sessions of this level of intensity are only possible in a ringing centre – you probably wouldn’t want to spend that long on just a couple of trainees at a normal tower practice night. But some things can be carried over and, after a while, the trainees start to come back as helpers. That’s when learning little‘ tricks’ like Bayles can really help. If you’ve started to learn Plain Bob Doubles, and your tower tries to help you but doesn’t yet know Bayles Doubles, then you should encourage them to learn it. It can be fun learning to swap between Plain Bob Doubles and Bayles Doubles, and Bayles is a fantastic way to help learners get to grips with the dodges in Plain Bob Doubles and to improve their striking and rope sight. You’ve not heard of Bayles Doubles?  It’s used to repeat a lead of Plain Bob Doubles over and over again. The two dodging bells and the one making long fifths just keep repeating that work, and many of the treble cues remain correct. This means, for instance, that if someone makes a bit of a hash of one of the dodges,the conductor can just call “Bayles” at that point, and they do the dodge again next time around, and keep doing it until the conductor calls for Plain Bob to continue.

The only two bells with something different to do are the treble and the bell that made seconds. There is a resource file on SmART Ringer here  which gives the grid and a description of how to ring it and when to use it, so I’m not going to repeat that here. If you think this might be of use to you, go and get a copy and encourage your tower to try it.

This article by Mike Rigby (tower Captain at Lighthorne) first appeared in the January 2020 edition of Tower Talk. To receive ART’s free, quarterly e-magazine for new ringers, please subscribe here and next time, it’ll arrive in your inbox