It all started several years ago, when Jonathan Frye and Angela Deakin asked if we were interested in forming a handbell band, including teaching Angela to ring handbells. We had been trying and failing to do just this for many years (for reasons far too boring to go into), so we said ‘YES’.
(Really, it all started when Mike Clay began some regular handbell practices with some of the students in Edinburgh and various other handbell ringers in the area, including Jonathan. One day our schedules will mesh enough to all ring together – but in handbell ringing, patience is everything.)
Our journey from those first beginnings to where we are now has been both fun and interesting. Also, we learned a lot about teaching handbells to people at various levels of ability. Through it all we have discussed theories of how people learn, best methods of learning (we don’t always agree), and how to transfer some of this expertise into the bell tower.
The blogs below are about that journey, our progress and the progress of other bands by guest authors. They describe the ups and downs as they happen, as honestly as we can.
We've done a lot of ringing in the last two weeks, a lot of it on handbells, and I've rung with an unusually large number of people. I had a visit to the Edinburgh handbell band, which included losing a quarter of Bristol and practising some other surprise major methods...
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...
For once, everything proceeded exactly according to plan!
We started by slotting in an extra quarter on Friday evening. When I discovered that Matt would be arriving relatively early, I thought I'd better organise something to occupy us for the evening, so we rang Bob Major for Zoé's first handbell...
For the Five O'Clock Club today it seemed that we had a band for treble bob royal, but there was a question of whether we could try something other than Kent or Oxford. I suggested Albion Little Treble Bob, which is a treble version of Little Bob. At a late...
Yesterday Jonathan and Angela arranged a quarter of Anniversary Delight Major as a compliment to Martin Mellor, the SACR Publicity Officer, and his partner Ewan Halley. It's a variation of Pudsey, with the place notation x58x16 at the beginning of the lead replaced by 56x56.18 and symmetrically at the end...
I have mentioned before that we have been ringing handbells on Sunday afternoons with three of the Glasgow ringers: Jessica, Colin and Zoé. Yesterday only Colin and Zoé could come, and Tina was busy with Dorothy, so we had a six-bell session. We started with a 360 of Bob Minor, which...
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...
A few weeks ago we temporarily suspended the Glasgow tower-bell practice and had a Ringing Room session. Peter and I found ourselves ringing two bells each for a course of London Minor, which was a first for Peter. Thus inspired, the next time Angela wasn't available for handbell ringing we...
This afternoon we rang Jessica's first handbell quarter: Plain Bob Minor with her on the trebles. We had an attempt a few weeks ago, which was going well but we had to stop when we realised we had miscalculated the time available before needing to drop our son Thomas off...
It's been an intensive Yorkshire-fest in the last few days. On Thursday we rang a quarter of royal, which Tina called as practice for her upcoming peal of Yorkshire Major. One thing that tripped us up a couple of times was thinking that everyone above 2nd place dodges when the...