Ringing Forums

I am generally not available for weddings and I don't have a cat.

you are entirely safe from the world of meringue couture then :rofl:

In our tower of six, the fee is £20 per rope plus £20 for church funds: we ring in and out. We rarely have weddings, so I give my £20 to the tower fund – if we had two weddings every week I might think differently about that!

you refer to 'church funds' and 'the tower fund'. Are they the same thing?

Not so far as I am aware. There's a separate tower fund for such things as routine maintenance.

Here at St Tudy in Cornwall we charge £100 for the wedding bells and we ring half an hour before and after the service. No part of this payment goes to individual ringers, but it is paid to the PCC Bell Fund for bell maintenance. I consider it is my duty and privilege to ring for any church service without personal payment.

This came up in conversation in the pub after practice last night. X told us that when he started ringing in Devon, he got 10 shillings for a wedding - which covered 5 pints of beer at 1/10. Y noted that the £20 per rope we now get paid covers 4 pints (at just under £4 a pint in our local) and his train fare (which at £3.95 is about the same cost as a pint).

Of course the cost of beer varies, but does this suggest that 'the cost of 5 pints of beer' is a useful place to start one's calculation?