We recently attempted (unsuccessfully, alas) a peal of Stedman Caters, because Matt, Jess and Julia were all in Glasgow for a tower bell peal. The composition we have usually rung is this 5067 by Matt, but this time he called something different.

5184 Stedman Caters
Matthew J L Durham...

The biggest Stedman news this week is Henry Pipe calling the Impossible One-Part on handbells. It's a peal composition by Alan Burbidge, carefully designed to be as difficult as possible. There are equal numbers of plains, bobs and singles, and no repeated sequences of more than a few sixes...

I must confess, which I think I have written before, that I have never been much of a Stedman conductor. Our recent campaign of ringing Stedman Triples regularly has given me the opportunity and motivation to try to work out how I can see more of what's going on. One...

Last week we attempted another quarter of Stedman Triples, this time with me conducting. We didn't get it, partly because of internet problems. We tried again yesterday and succeeded. I rang the tenors, which (as expected) reduced the task of ringing Stedman and putting the bobs in to a manageable...

We rang another quarter of Stedman last week, this time with Julia conducting. There was a false start but after that we rang well, and Julia did some impressive correcting of mistakes. We're not ringing this week, but next week it's my turn to conduct, which I will do from...

We scored a quarter yesterday, after a couple of short false starts. Generally the ringing was good, and we even managed to recover from a few mistakes. It will be important to have some resilience if we're going to be able to ring a peal.

I was impressed by both...

We've started a Stedman Triples project with Marcus and Julia. Tina, Julia and I all like Stedman, but there's never much enthusiasm from the rest of the Albany Quadrant regulars, so when Marcus mentioned that he had been trying Stedman with the Five O'Clock Club and would like to do...

One of the Ringing Room quarters this week was supposed to be Stedman Cinques, but Jeff Ladd was having internet problems (which had also been a challenge the previous day for Bristol Royal) and pulled out. Instead, Alan Winter called a quarter of Stedman Caters, which we rang very well...

The hardest thing about ringing Stedman on handbells is the slow work, or more specifically, managing to keep one bell straight in the slow work without losing track of your other bell.  It can also be very challenging to keep track of which handbell is doing which when both are...