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.
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...
Normally we organise handbell days twice per year, in May and October, with a combination of quarter peals and practice sessions. We've missed the last three because of the pandemic, but yesterday we restarted with a small-scale event involving 12 people.
The morning focused on getting our three new Glasgow...
Last week we had a live ringing session with Jessica, who we have been teaching in Ringing Room. We spent some time working on handbell ringing style and adapting to the delay between starting the physical movement and the bell sounding. After an evening's practice we were pretty well up...
This week I have been ringing every day since Sunday! Not all handbells, but still, it's been a long time since such an intensive week. Sunday and Tuesday were in the tower, but all the rest were handbells.
On Monday we had a second attempt at the peal of 4-spliced...