Such a lot has happened in the period since the publication of the last Guild Newsletter and I’ll only be able to scratch the surface in this brief outline!

It has been wonderful to see the new Guild Web Site come to life and I’m so grateful to Rebecca, Mark and Dan Banner for all their hard work. If you haven’t looked at the web site yet, I urge you to visit www.leicesterdg.org.uk to see the wealth of information and resources. The video that Rebecca has created on the front page has received lots and lots of positive feedback.

In May, a huge number of towers in the Guild had their bells rung to celebrate the Coronation. It was lovely to see all the reports and photographs of the ringing that took place and it was especially pleasing to see the large number of new ringers taking part, many of whom were recruited under the “Ring for the King” initiative. Most towers in the Guild had their bells rung over the weekend, with lots of bands arranging to ring at several different towers. Many towers are now proudly displaying their certificates, downloaded from the Ringing World’s Bellboard, on their ringing room walls.

I previously reported on the Open Day “Taster Event” that we held to try to recruit new ringers for Birstall and Wanlip. In the last few months, we have held regular Sunday afternoon training sessions at Birstall and Monday evening training sessions at Wanlip. These have been well supported by both ringing teachers and new recruits and I’m pleased to report that our students have been making really good progress. Several of the recruits are now handling their bells on their own and are ringing rounds confidently. It is worth noting that a number of the trainers (including myself) had attended a recent Association of Ringing Teachers (ART) Module 1 course at Hathern. The Birstall/Wanlip learners have allowed us to put many of the ART principles into practice. Even for those of us who were already confident teachers, the ART course gave us a few new tools to add to our armoury! I would like to express a huge thank you to the many teachers who have joined in with the tuition of the Birstall and Wanlip recruits. Our recruits range in age from 6 to over 60, and there are four potential new members for the Leicestershire Foundry Foxes.

I was very proud to present Hannah, a new learner from Wanlip, with her “Learning the Ropes Level One – Bell Handling” certificate. Her father, Paul Wilcox, is organist at Wanlip and several other churches and it was a bonus to discover that he’s already a competent ringer.

Ringing at Wanlip has been interesting as the ringing room has a very large number of bees. We had been assured that these were masonry bees, and that they’re harmless and there each year. They weren’t bothering us (apart from the odd one landing on the ringers) so we carried on. A few weeks ago, we noticed some very nice honeycombs that had been built at the top of the ringing room ladder. There were also thousands of bees going in and out of the tower masonry. It transpired that the bees are honey bees and they now swarm if anyone turns the light on or attempts to ring! Ringing has been temporarily suspended awaiting collection of the bees by a local beekeeper. It was such a shame as this all happened in the week that we’d planned to ring for the first Sunday evensong with a new band. We are anticipating that ringing at Wanlip (Monday evening, 7.30pm) will resume shortly.

Over the last few months, my life has been almost taken over with selling badges, expertly designed by Rebecca Banner, to commemorate ringing for the Coronation of King Charles III. Many bands ordered badges in advance of the Coronation and it was really rewarding to see pictures of whole bands proudly wearing them.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but little did I know how popular the badges would be! Many people have taken the opportunity to also order badges to mark ringing for the passing of HM Queen Elizabeth II. To date, I have packed well over 800 parcels and badges have been sent out all over the world. Over 6,000 Coronation and 2,500 Queen Elizabeth badges have been sold, with orders still coming in every day. Sadly, I’ve not been able to supply the “badgers” that one band wanted! I am now an expert on weights/parcel dimensions/postal charges and our local postmaster’s face sinks when he sees me arrive with yet another batch of purple bubble envelopes and purple boxes.

Sally Brown