Ringing Forums

Sorry for coming to this late.

older ringers have told me that they think the origin of today’s problem is the people who learnt in the 1970’s and made little effort to teach or recruit for their whole ringing career — Lucy Chandhial

That's an interesting observation. I wonder if it has any substance or maybe it's just one generation blaming another. Certainly those of us who started in the 50s and 60s had a very different life experience growing up after the war and we had far more freedom than youngsters now which might have shaped our characters, but it seems a bit sweeping to heap the blame on those who came after us.

I'm not saying age isn't a factor, but I think it's far less important than the ringing hierarchy's apparent obsession with it would suggest. — John de Overa

I think 'obsession' is a bit strong. It seems ensible to focus attention where the biggest problems are. Currently it is much easier to recruit 50+ than to recruit youingsters so it's sensible to focus on getting more youngsters, especially since in ringing there is a strong correlation between leadership and high achievement with having started young.

It's teaching people to ring a bell, not trapeze, anyone who can safely drive a car should have the necessary reaction times. — John de Overa

It's about more than reaction times. To react effectively you need full confidence in your own ability to control the bell in extreme conditions, which as Ropger said, a lot of people don't.

We could make a big impact by encouraging those in leadership positions to delegate far more — Roger Booth

Agreed, but we should go beyond individual delegation and institutionalise the idea that it is normal for a band to have a team of several officers running things. We have Foreman (aka TC) and deputy, Ringing Master and deputy, Secretary, Treasurer and Steeplekeeper. As well as reducing individual load it means that collectively we can do more. And we are in a more robust position if one of the pieces is knocked off the board.

Another common assumption seems to be that once people can handle a bell well enough to ring CC's and PH, handling training is over. I think that's wrong — John de Overa

Absolutely. The skill needed for high speed formation cycling is way more nthan getting to the end of a straight street without falling off. And in any case 'well enough to ring' usually means 'well enough to struggle through' not 'well enough to ring confidently and accurately'.

It would be a shame to miss the opportunity to capture capability. Currently the only data we have on teachers is from ART. There were lots of teachers before ART and we don't know how many are still active but have not gone down the ART route.

help us understand the number of towers where no one can teach. Although it looks like it’s focused on individual ringers saying what they have done in a week so it might not capture the teaching gaps — Lucy Chandhial

If you want to capture what people ‘can’ do then asking what they ‘did’ in one week isn’t the best way to do it.

the task splits into two, organising the ringers and organising the towers. I organise regular quarters in hand so I only have to do the ringer part. Obviously you need a pool of ringers who are interested in ringing, and who you are happy to ring with you. You need more ringers on the list than a band’s worth because they will have times when they aren’t available. So on any given date you might have more or fewer than you need.
Each month i ask who is available on all the dates that month (Sunday afternoons in our case). Then I select bands from who is available.
If I have just enough on a given week then I choose a method to suit the band.
If I have more than enough I make a selection, bearing in mind things like who hasn’t rung one lately or whether a particular combination would help someone to achieve something they haven’t previously.
If I don’t have enough then we don’t ring that week. However since there are more tower bell ringers around than handbell ringers you might be able to top up the band with someone outside your normal group.
I used to confirm each band during the preceding week but that meant someone who had said they were available at the end of the month not knowing whether they were needed for several weeks, so now I circulate updates as soon as I know what bands will work. That has the secondary benefit that anyone who hasn’t got round to replying might offer to ring on a week where we are one short.

My experience of these "learn an activity" type programmes is that the presenters are very, very quick at learning and pick it up significantly quicker than the average learner. — Jonathan Frye

That’s what I thought about Mike Bushell, who had the official record for learning the most number of sports. I ass7med he would be good at learning new skills, like the actors in Midsomer Murders had been. But I was wrong. He clearly expected it to require some macho effort, which made it hard to get him to relax and feel what the bell was doing.
As Jonathan said, we had no control over the final product, a three minute slot on BBC Breakfast, with an estimated audience of 12 million, see https://allsaintswokinghambells.org.uk/Articles/BBCBreakfast.html

I didn’t have such a negative impression. He was clearly flustered but not terrified, and given the build up that he was trying to perform a skilled act with negligible training the fact that he struggled isn’t surprising, and the competent way Darren managed his attempt showed he wasn’t in any danger,
If anything the calm competence of the other ringers contrasted with his fumbling showed was a good portrayal of a skilled activity.
The best test of 5he film would be to show it to a non ringer (all of it, not just the practical bit). I think you would find positive responses.
The view outside our little bubble is often different from the internal view. I remember after we filmed Midsomer Murders ringers were quick to find the faults and object to how it showed ringers but non ringers were impressed by how much there was to ringing. (I even got a recruit from someone who knew nothing about ringing before she saw the film, and wanted to learn after she later moved to England.)

what happens if you don’t?

You don't need to tell CAS what you are ringing. ..., The model simply accepts the order in which they rang. — Jonathan Frye

CIREL attempts to identify the method, in which case bells in the wrong place count as (big) errors. If it can't then it just accepts the order they struck.

The downside of this mechanism is that with poor ringing where the bells frequently don't ring in the right order the software struggles to cope with it. — Jonathan Frye

CIREL doesn't struggle, it just generates a result! And the overall error will be correct. The real downside is that errors get moved between bells. Suppose 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 ring perfectly and 3 rings in position 4.1 (ie an error of +1.1 places). 4 will get an error of +1 while 3 gets an error of +0.1.
The practical effect is that all scores look bad in rubbish touches. But you don't need a machine to tell you a touch is rubbish so no one bothers to look.
If the result of a touch doesn't look what someone was expecting it's quite common to ask whoever is near enough to read whether it recognised the method. If not then individual differences get ignored.

[CAS] ... more useful feature was the ability to visualise piece of ringing — Jonathan Frye

That's also the primary output of CIREL. It shows the real strike positions of all bells in black with the 'ideal' positions in green behind it, and has the option of adding the line of one or more bells. That is the most useful display for detailed diagnisis of individual issues such as over or under shooting leads and lies, sloppy dodges or places, sluggish turn rounds, and so on. It also has the option to highlight errors above a preset threshold, which can be useful for getting overall impressions, eg more early than late,close hunting up and wide hunting down.
You can also drill down for more detail on individual bells and you can analyse limited portions of the ringing.
But that takes more time to study, so it is most relevant to detailed coaching or team practice before a competition.
In general practices there isn't usually time for that so what gets used most (by us) is the information CIREL generates at the end of every touch: a bar chart of RMS error for every bell with a line across the average, and a bar chart showing prevalence of errors (above threshold) late/early, hand/back for each bell (plus some figures). They are easy to take in from wherever you are ringing (providing the Treble stands to one side).

can also deliver numerical statistics about whether people are consistently quick or slow at each stroke, and what their standard deviation is. We found this to be of relatively little use for a local band — Jonathan Frye

That's what CIREL's graphs show and it is certainly of interest. Most people do look at it after each touch. If it looks particularly good overall someone often asks what the actual value was, and there is quiet rivalry among the better ringers to have lower individual errors. Learners (with higher errors obviously) also look at it to learn 'how' they may have done.

... how to adjust Abel to match the odd-struckness of the bells. I would urge you not to do this — Jonathan Frye

The question is why you would want the simulated sound to match the odd struckness. If you are trying to train a team to ring those specific odd struck bells as well as possible in a performance then maybe you should, but for any other purpose, notably developing the general capability of a band then I would share Jonathan's view.
However if (as in the original question) you are not generating simulated sound but using sensors to score the accuracy of striking with open sound then it clearly is important for the senhsor signal to match the timing of the sound heard by the ringers.

I’m not familiar with CAS but they’re is an alternative you might like to look at. We use CIREL which takes input from a Bagley sensor and saves touches in Lowndes format.
The analysis is simpler than what Hawkear (I assume using CAS) gives but we find it useful.
We have calibrated our sensor timings to match the clapper timings by ringing te bell own with Abel sound as well and adjusting the delay until we couldn’t tell which was first. All can’t (or couldn’t when we did it) adjust for oddstruckness but our bells aren’t.
Apply to share our experience.
See: cirel.org.uk.

Do you never nod your head during a discussion? — Jonathan Frye

Probably but I don't expect it to be recorded. I also wave my hands round while talking but I don't expect that to be recorded either.

why do you need to ‘express agreement’? It’s a discussion not a decision making forum.

No thank you!! This forum is for the exchange of ideas, not a popularity contest.

yes most of them are charities, so would need Charity Commission approval to change their objectives. But the charity commission’s concerns are not to prevent change, they are to ensure that the objectives meet charitable criteria and that the charity is effectively using them. Funds sitting unused are not being effective and supporting ringing might be more effective than adding too an already under used stock of bells.

we generally only take on a couple at a time for that reason. However in the late 70s / early 80s we used to take on five or six a year and keep most of them, and grew to over 30 ringers for a few years. Not sure ho we did it, especially as one person taught each batch.

I foresee this disengagement leading to a reduction in the the YACR's membership roll. — Peter Sotheran

I can't speak for Yorkshire, but based on experience here I question some of Peter's implicit accumptions. Members who never take part in any society activity are already disengaged. Handing over a sub when asked to someone in your own tower does not constitute engagement with the society.
And in a tower where societ membership is expected, paying the sub (which in nthe grand scheme of things is trivial) is probably seen as tower loyalty rather than anything wider.
For several years we've been getting requests to pay direct by bank transfer from people who prefer not to carry cash. We resisted that because the risk of payments not matching up with membership lists from towers could have made the Treasurer's job more difficult, but with an online system membership renewal and subs payment can be integrated.
The need for a conscious action to renew membership might reduce roles slightly, but those lost will be the disengaged.. ODG membership went down about 4% in 2025 when online renewal was introduced but has gone up a bit in 2026, but in any case that's within the historic year to year variation.
Looking at it from the society perspective, try to increzse engagement by all means, but if you can't, what value is there in membership numbers being inflated by with people who are members in name only?

we too used to get attendances of 30+ for monthly Branch practices 40 years ago, and they were predictable- 6-9pm on the 3rd Saturday. But predictable time or not we wouldn’t get that many now. Other things have changed since then. And distance isn’t an issue, all our towers are within 8 miles of me. However, most practices are just ringing with no meeting, so the boringness or otherwise isn’t an issue either. The lack of engagement of about half our members seems to be driven by something else.

The CC has used workshop format meetings.
Under the old regimme, most years there was an Open Meeting the day before the Council meeting when a hot topic would be debated at length. As the name suggests they were open to anyone to take part. Sometimes they were stand alone (eg in 2000 I ran one on what we had learnt from the Millennium recruitment drive) and at other times they expllored a topic that was on the eganda for the meeting, for example in 2016 over Council reform. Generally they worked well and were useful.
The nearest there has been under the new regime is short sessions before the main meeting where workgroup activity can be discussed but in practice they were more 'presentation + questions than debate. There have also been sessions on the morning after, which were less rushed but still not really a debate.
The Council is responding (perhaps over reacting) to criticism that meetings were too long, and to the desire to offer something else. Inevitable adding a mini roadshow and/orlocal training events into the same total time squeezes the business, especially if you reatain the traditional tower grab.

people can now choose to be part of a workgroup ... this leaves some reps ‘only’ turning up once a year to represent and not actively contributing or questioning what’s being done — Lucy Chandhial

There have always been Council members who 'only turn up once a year'. Even when Council committees were staffed entirely by Council members around 60% did not serve on a committee.
When members were only fed information once a year they could be forgiven for focusing their contribution on the meeting weekend, but now that the Executive has to report every month as well as annually, there are more opportunities to ask questions and if necessary take action. That oversight role is now more important with the Council run by a more powerful Executive.
That role doesn't need 200 people and I suspect being part of such a large group dilutes the feeling of individual responsibility. A smaller meeting would also cost less, and the dynamic of a 'meeting room' would be different from that of a 'lecture theatre'.