St Martins Guild

Harborne, St Peter

Saturday 20 March 2010

2 hrs 45 Tenor 13 cwt

5088 Yorkshire Surprise Major

comp. GAC John

Margaret A Edwards Treble

Catherine R Taylor 2

Eric WR Bumstead 3

Janet A Horton 4

Maurice F Edwards 5

Michael Rigby 6

Clare McArdle 7

Stephen W Horton Tenor

Conducted by Catherine R Taylor

We are a popular tower and cater for ringers at all levels. Practice nights will usually include ringing from Rounds and Call-Changes to Surprise Major and every station in between.

We are affiliated to the St Martin’s Guild of Church Bell Ringers and a good number of our ringers are regular supporters of Guild events. We have a good relationship with several other local towers (Northfield, Smethwick, Shirley, Birmingham Cathedral, Edgbaston) and many of our ringers overlap. We sometimes struggle to accommodate everyone in the ringing room on a Monday night.
There are so many people that they are squashed into corners and several of them end up sitting on the floor in the middle of the rope circle!

It isn’t just the ringing though, we are a very sociable tower and regularly hold social events that don’t involve ringing or extra extended teaching sessions, using our simulator so that we don’t annoy the neighbours, which are relaxed and usually involve good food – on New Year’s Day this year 25 people turned up for a cooked breakfast in the Parish Hall followed by 4 hours of ringing practice targeted at our Plain Bob Doubles/Minor ringers. It was wonderful that all the experienced ringers were so willing to come and help out – maybe the breakfast had something to do with it!

Here are a couple of links to youtube where you can hear how good the bells sound. One of them gives you a bit of an idea of how squashed we are on practice nights.

You will hear the bells ringing on Saturdays, especially through the summer months, for weddings. We are happy to ring for any special occasion if requested. In return a donation for our Tower Fund, for the upkeep of the bells, would be gratefully accepted.

The only limits we put on ringing is that only one peal attempt is allowed each calendar month, bearing in mind a peal can be 3 hours of non-stop ringing. Outside of these peal attempts and "normal" ringing (ie 5.45 - 6.00pm on Sunday and 7.00 - 9.00pm on Monday) the only extra ringing that occurs is:

Visiting ringers requesting the bells for some general ringing (not usually for more than an hour)

At the Worcester Cathedral Ringing Teaching Centre	Go Ape, Wyre Forest
Five Ring Their First Quarter Peals - August 2009
Barbecue to celebrate	Henry Johnson Dinner

The tower contains nine bells: the modern ring of eight, and a bell dating from 1691 which is the preserved tenor of the old ring, now hung dead and used as a service bell.

The ring of eight, cast in 1923 by John Taylor of Loughborough, originally belonged to another belfry: that of the Bishop Ryder Memorial Church, Gem Street, near Lancaster Circus in Birmingham city centre. The bells were a recasting of an earlier eight (tenor 11½ cwt) by William Blews & Sons of Birmingham, 1868.

Partly on account of the spacious tower at Gem Street, but principally of course thanks to their vintage – a great era in Loughborough’s true-harmonic bell production – the new bells were regarded as among the very best of their kind, too good indeed to be lost to Birmingham’s ringing community. When closure and demolition of that church was in train in 1960, arrangements were fortunately made for the whole ring with its fittings to be transferred to Harborne, where it replaced an existing old-style eight which was in poor condition. The cost of the relocation and a new iron-and-steel bell frame was borne by the Hawkins family of Harborne in memory of a relative, and the ring formally rededicated here in March 1963.

Whether there was any ringing tradition at St Peter’s in the post-Reformation period prior to 1691 is not known, but at that date a new ring of six (tenor 9 cwt) was made for the church by William Bagley of Chacombe, Oxfordshire. Of these, the second was recast by Thomas Mears of Whitechapel in 1799. Two trebles were added by John Warner & Sons of London in 1877. Some rehanging work was done by J.E. Groves of Birmingham in 1924.

William Chattel, a formidable leader of ringing in mid-19^th century Birmingham, is buried in St. Peter’s churchyard, as is John Day (1825-1902), Chattel’s pupil and a subsequent leader and historian of Birmingham ringing who lived in the parish and who had promoted the idea of making the six in this tower up to eight. John Day’s father, and uncle Thomas Day, the eminent conductor and composer of peals, had been ringers at St. Peter’s for a period in their youth in the 1810s (see ‘The Recollections of John Day’).

Weight approximately 9 cwt, note G

RLJ October 2008

The present clock was made by Leeson of Coleshill in 1877. It strikes the hours, chimes Westminster Quarters and shows time on two 5 foot diameter flat copper dials, one over the West door and the other on the north side.

The original weights were housed in a small shaft leading down to the church porch below but the pendulum and escarpment were removed and the clock was converted in 1973 by Smith’s of Derby to operate using a synchronised motor for the Going train and direct electric drive motors for the Strike and Quarters.

It has been serviced by the Derbyshire based clock maker/repairer Richard Blackwall since 1999.

St. Peter's Church, Harborne