Ringing Forums

On a related note, whereas in the past Central Council committees might have met face to face on a regular basis, with travel expenses being a significant part of committee budgets, since I have been President I think there has only been one. There doesn't seem to be a lot to be gained from dragging people around the country to meet face to face compared with the benefit to individuals of retaining more of their personal time. So we are saving money and enabling volunteers to be more efficient.

Yesterday though I went from Birmingham to Wells on CC business (an eight hour round trip), and was able to calculate the marginal cost of getting there and back compared with the CC expenses policy. I made a small loss.

The possibility of a survey was discussed on another thread a month or so ago. Needs serious consideration and it is going to get picked up in some current CC discussions.

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.

The total number of members declared by societies for the purposes of numbers of CC Reps is about 35,000. There will be a little duplication of course, but not that much.

Thanks I'll sort

If we tried to do a print version of this, how would you deal with the links to video content? Would you still point the reader to video content so they can watch, maybe with a specific accompanying website, or would the book have to function entirely as offline content? You'll appreciate having read it now that it benefits from this video content, but there is probably still valuable content without it.

I visited a tower last night and they were comparing wedding money in the pub. I reported £20 as being fairly standard but this was more than they were charging.

The more interesting discussion point however was how long to ring for. The ring for 15 minutes afterwards based on what they think the attendees expect/value - ringing as the couple emerge from the church, accompaniment as all other guests emerge, some ringing while they are milling around in churchyard, but then no need to accompany all of the photo taking with bells. The effect has worn off by then.

They also said how one of their relatives had thought that change ringing was when the bells had gone wrong, and that only rounds was 'right'. That was an interesting one!

good point, hence how with closed handstroke lead ringing you need to push the handstrokes so positively to keep the backstrokes up and stop the ringing accelerating away.

We have a winner.

One of the things I say in my new book http://callchanges.cccbr.org.uk is that ringing bells on or slightly below the balance gets them into a natural rhythm of their swing speeds. So provided the bells are evenly struck they fall into place more easily. Method ringing's handstroke gap takes us out of the natural rhythm of the bell.

The 'cat in a fex' is used by Charlie in the methods she currently knows, which is a pretty standard repertoire

Hmmm, not bad I suppose

Question is then, if you are marking faults, how many did you spot?
2nd is quick at backstroke occasionally, e.g. just before the lower, but I'm splitting hairs

Yes thank you John - that was very interesting and must have been great to have done. Midsummer Murders is just too long though!
My only filming/ringing anecdote was when we were on a quarter peal tour as young ringers and we were about to start ringing a quarter at Chuchill (I think). A producer came in in panic and asked us how long we were going to ring for and we said an hour, at which point he got a wad of notes out and asked us how much we wanted. We accepted what was for teenagers untold wealth and we decided to miss that tower out.

On a similar theme, a peal met short this weekend because one member of the band's electric car did not have enough juice to get them there, and two charging points en route were broken. Has anyone had that happen before in ringing context?

I also think it wouldn't work hence saying it was in jest! It is something that could quite easily have happened I think, maybe in the dim and distant past, if the Council had been asked by the Church to fix rates, but it's probably more likely to have been done on a Diocesan basis.

It is increasingly a problem for dealing with young ringers as well as older ringers. I don't have any young ringers who would get an email and I have to get to them via WhatsApp or Messenger if I want to communicate directly. There doesn't seem to be a system that allows the same message to be sent to an email address and a WhatsApp group unless anyone has found one?

Maybe the Central Council should agree a standard rate with the CofE to be applied to all weddings to remove any uncertainty. I jest!
Is there a recommended rate for organists though from the RCO? The organ is a bit different as in many places playing the organ is a paid job.

I don't understand the taxing peal ringers thing. Well I do, but don't agree. It depends what you think peal ringing is for and what it achieves.

When the St Martin's Guild abolished peal fees, one of the arguments for doing so was that peal fees seemed to be a tax on peal ringing, and given peal ringing was something we wanted to encourage just like all other forms of ringing, it didn't seem right to levy a charge just on that.

The fees had originally been to pay for illuminated peal book writing but that is done electronicaly now. and the printing and binding is just seen as a Guild overhead.

How many members of the MC&LDG think that the Personal Accident policy pays out to them personally if they have an accident? One of the things Marcus was saying recently was that these PA policies are in the name of the association as beneficiary, and so it is the association, which won't actually have suffered a loss, which get any payment. Policies may vary though, and some may be written such that an individual subscribed member is the beneficiary, but many are not.

I don't want to divert this very interesting discussion - I too like Graham John's idea. it's just an aside to say that we are currently consulting on changing the way in which societies pay their CC affiliation fees to be based on membership numbers rather than numbers of reps. The total number of members reported last year was about 37,000, including 1700 from the Veronese and some overlap (e.g. ASCY and SRCY). I imagine if there is a financial incentive to count actually active ringers the number will suddenly get very realistic, and a lot lower!

One of the big decisions made at the inception of the Birmingham School of Bell Ringing was charging. We set it at £5 a session, and that would be at a session which would have a maximum of about four students. It has never met any resistance, and the only feedback we have received was that it should be higher.

A few weeks ago one of the young ringers at Moseley started coming to the Monday night 'adults' practice in addition to the Thursday night 'kids' practice. When I started the kids practices I put a charge on it - just a token £2 - but it made the point that it shouldn't be free. We we pay for certificates, snacks, the odd broken stay, etc. When they turned up to the adult practice they didn't understand why the same charge didn't apply, and it was interesting having to explain to the parent why it was.