Ringing Forums

An appropriately-designed course plus a warning to towers to steer clear of 27 pages of required reading before visitors can attend would encourage greater engagement with safeguarding rules.

The Yorkshire Association offers a one day course tailored to ringers, which apparently had very useful content. Unfortunately, our branch has had its turn now, so its a case of shell out for our new officers to trek across the county by train and country bus to an obscure village hall, potentially needing an overnight stay if far enough away, or persuade the parish to send us to a diocese-run session which goes into far too much detail, requires too much prep, and is not really suited to ringers (and is probably on a day when people work). Persuading people to ring is hard enough already; persuading people to take leadership and support roles is harder still. Add in hours of training at inconvenient times and you either end up with a) the rules on training being ignored, or b) people not stepping up to take posts or even ring at all.

Then again, we have it good where we are. Rabid parishes who demand mountains of paperwork for leaders and ordinary ringers alike are one way to kill off ringing, and putting too much bureaucracy in the way of visiting other towers is also likely to kill off interest as well as affect local bands who benefit from visitors. I am happy to sign a book with my name and home tower, and for this to be enforced. I am not happy to have to bring my "papers" with me as if I am trying to cross the border, and fill in consent forms as if I am applying for a passport.

When I am organising ringing tours, I am not going to go through this farce for each tower on the tour and subject the participants on the tour to the same, particularly if each diocese and parish does its own thing. Beyond booking the tower and sending ahead details of children and vulnerable adults, I am not prepared to mess about with paperwork for each tower, except for "special" towers like York Minster.

At the end of the day, this is a voluntary role, as the Sunday School role is for the person you met. I am giving my time up to help ring bells for the church and all I get in return for said activity is the enjoyment of ringing and the associated community. If I am having to put in additional time and effort which have no additional benefit to me, then the church ought to be making it easy for us or compensating us for the additional time accordingly.

Not having any experience at association level, I would not wish to comment on whether that part of the system still works. But for most ringers, the most influential force in their ringing activities must be the benefice/parish level. They are the one who call the shots, and interpret diocesean rules and advice as they see fit.

This is where the problems lie, because the concept of local bands is in decline, or local bands are more transient. @Phillip George's tower seems to be a case study of "how to do it" for a local band, but you're not going to get that same relationship if you are covering multiple towers, or if there is only ad-hoc ringing from bands from other areas or non-territorial bands.

In this case, who is the main contact to be?

• A ringer who happens to live locally? They don't have as much of an incentive to keep relations particularly strong as they are not necessarily maintaining opportunities for themself if there is no band to ring with, and they are just one person.
• A member of the church team, either formally or informally? They don't necessarily have the contacts with the ringers or an understanding of our culture or practices.
• A member of the cluster or area band? Are they keen to do it or is it that they're the only one who is willing to do it and someone is needed to keep the bells ringable and make sure the church continues to allow ringing for the cluster or area band?

Giles, the traditional model only works if most towers have a tower band. But if we were to do a census of all towers nationally, how many would have a tower band who practice regularly with all bells and ring for Sunday services? And if there was data from 1990, what would be the difference in numbers?

I would be interested to hear from others of examples of best practice where there is no local band (either with no local ringers or with clustering/area arrangements).

Our parish changed the service times and neglected to inform us, and low numbers post pandemic preventing Sunday service ringing was not commented on by the vicar... I suppose its changing priorities. Clustering is definitely the way forward for keeping ringing going on Sundays at churches which want it (which do not always correlate with the towers with a resident band).

For members at the smallest end, we are paying over four times more per head than the larger societies, and we have fixed costs too.

As for "what are we getting for our money", you can't have an effective Central Council without a suitable budget, and I don't think everyone is happy to pay for said effective council.

I think one of the issues is the lack of 'involved' people. The 88 report states concerns about the number of teachers and steeplekeepers, and a lack of vibrancy at guild level. Certainly at my tower, one person is all three and is the only one who can do all of those things. It'd be interesting to see the bus factor for each critical role in towers and guilds - I know in our area, this dedicated individual getting run over by the bus could cause a chain reaction locally and result in a number of towers falling silent.

On overall numbers, a proposal is being put to the CC meeting in September to move CC affiliation fees to being based on the number of members rather than the number of Reps. Under the current Rules associations have justified their number of Representatives based on declared membership numbers, and whilst it's very unlikely that numbers are exaggerated just to get an extra Rep, there has been no motivation either to be absolutely certain the number is right. Moving to a model which has a direct link between number of members and cost (albeit not a particularly high cost) is likely to lead to much tighter scrutiny by societies of how many members they actually have. — Simon Linford

Sounds interesting - what sort of cost per member is being looked at?

I am increasingly of the opinion that some sort of census of ringers is required. No-one knows how many active ringers we have, their standard, if they can/do teach, and how often they visit each tower. Association/guild membership numbers seem to mean nothing now, with people not being active, not bothering with membership, or being double-counted by being a member of multiple guilds.

My worry is that we are overlooking areas where ringing is on the edge. The critical mass of ringers is faltering in some of the major cities even, and it's getting to the point where we don't have the handling instructors to take advantage of many of the recruitment opportunities which present themselves. Progression routes are minimal - there are call-changes towers and the elite towers, and increasingly little in-between.

The current layered system is overly-bureaucratic, and I'm really not convinced that the officers needed to run them are the best use of the increasingly-limited number of people willing to take on a leadership role.

A very sobering read; even more so given that so much of what that series discusses is still a problem now.