In 2023, Rebecca and I agreed to set ourselves the target of ringing quarter peals of all the Standard 8, working up to ringing the Standard 8 spliced together.

Educational Intermission

The “Standard 8” is a set of Surprise Major methods consisting of: Cambridge, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Superlative, Pudsey, London, Rutland and Bristol.

No-one quite knows where the grouping came from or why they were the “Standard”. It is possible that they were initially the only surprise methods that had been invented, but the true origins appear to be lost to time. Some more information can be found here.

Why did we choose the target of the Standard 8?

When we left university around 2001, we were regularly ringing Surprise Major methods, and could  manage them spliced. We possibly rang all 8 spliced together at practice night, but can’t quite remember that far back. We do recall having enough ringers at Ratby where we had also gone onto learning Belfast (one of the typical follow-on methods after learning the Standard 8).

However, life then got in the way: we had children, started ringing at Desford (only 6 bells), and were generally not able to keep up at the level that we had been. In the last few years, the children are now that bit older and we’ve been going out ringing more often and being able to ring at that level again.

My Alias

Soon after University, I started volunteering for Mozilla (who make the Firefox web browser). One of the chat systems (IRC for those that know of it) allowed all the developers to connect and chat together. Most of the developers had interesting aliases.

I was therefore looking for an alias that I could be known by, on the chat and in other places. With my strong love of bell-ringing, I settled on “Standard8” as my alias. I still use this today in various places, like my blog and on Mastodon.

As a result of my alias, over the years I have frequently talked to my (mostly non-UK) colleagues about bell ringing. Not everyone is interested but some are fascinated and it leads to some good conversations.

However, as I had not really rung the standard 8, getting around to finally being able to do that seemed to be fitting to have as a goal.

The Year

Before the year started, Rebecca had got together a group of ringers that were interested in ringing with us. Most of these rang at Loughborough Parish Church, either frequently or occasionally.

In the first half of the year, we started off slowly. We had a few failed attempts, and had to miss one or two occasions due to lack of ringers. As a result, by the time we had got through the summer holidays, we had only rung the “easier” ones – Cambridge, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

That left us with a quarter of the year left to complete the remaining five. We picked up the pace, and although we still had a couple of failed attempts we managed to complete Superlative, Rutland and Pudsey by the start of December.

We failed at an attempt of Bristol in mid-December, but managed to sneak another attempt in on the Friday before Christmas, in which we were successful.

We had originally thought about organising a day of quarter peals after Christmas to finish off any remaining, however with only London left, and a lack of energy for organising, we put together a single attempt on Friday 29th. Although there were a few trips, we were successful on the first attempt and the ringing was good throughout. This was a fitting end to the year.

Conducting

In the group of ringers that we had put together, a couple of them could have conducted, but they were not available as much to begin with, or they preferred to let someone else conduct. Whilst I had not conducted much Surprise Major, I had been conductor for other methods (mainly Triples), and so I started off the year conducting the simpler methods, and then as time went on, I ended up conducting all of them.

For me, this was an additional bonus of the year – I spent time learning about coursing orders (which I hadn’t really done so before as I’d never been introduced to them fully), and being able to conduct them has given me a lot of experience. I’m still not anywhere near the level of conducting expertise of some ringers, but I feel I’m able to at least make sure the bells are in the right order, and to help put people right in more cases.

The Quarters

We were both really happy to have completed the 8 within the year. Although it has sometimes been hard work to organise, and to keep learning, we have enjoyed ringing the quarters and pushing ourselves.

The Quarters have all (or will be) been published in the ringing world. They are also on BellBoard where you can find them from this link.

Thank yous

A big thank you to everyone that rang with us over the year. Also a special thanks to Robert Watson and Judith Godfrey for their advice and encouragement – Judith also happened to be the only other person that rang all the successful quarters with us.

I’d also like to thank Rebecca for suggesting the idea.

2024?

Where next I hear you ask? We’re going to work towards ringing the Standard 8 spliced.

I also have a few ideas for things that I want to conduct and ring that I didn’t have time for this year – Stedman Triples/Caters and Double Norwich Court Bob Major.

We also have a few (well 200-odd) dates of the year to fill in where we’ve not yet rung any quarters (no we’re not attempting all 200 this year!).

Mark Banner