Emma Southerington's 1000th peal as conductor

Last week, Emma Southerington reached the milestone of 1000 peals as conductor, with a peal of Lincolnshire Royal on handbells. This is a landmark that not many people have achieved - moreover, she has conducted more than 600 handbell peals, which is also an impressive total.

Turning to PealBase, let's have a look at some league tables. You will need to log in to PealBase to follow the links. Statistics are from 20th April 2019, the date of writing this article.

PealBase has a table of people who have rung 500 or more handbell peals. There are 59 of them (compared with 539 people who have rung 1000 or more peals - as we know, handbell ringing is a minority activity). Emma is 18th on the list with 1070 handbell peals. The number of people who have rung 1000 or more handbell peals is 21.

I don't think PealBase has a table for leading conductors, so I have produced one manually by looking at the records of the people on the leading handbell peal ringers list.

Rank Ringer HB Peals Conducted
1 John Mayne 1510
2 Bernard Groves 1459
3 Peter Randall 1418
4 Frank Morton 1189
5 Robert Smith 939
6 David Brown 924
7 Roger Bailey 824
8 William Croft 649
9 Emma Southerington 611
10 Jeremy Spiller 518
11 Richard Pearce 505